Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:
I'm looking at the various maintenance templates [...] wouldn't we want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never sees it unless the go looking?
Another thought on this topic.
What if we replaced all of our problem tags with something generic - {{notverygood}} or something. I'm thinking wording along the lines of:
"This article isn't very good yet. If you came here to learn about this topic, we apologize that we aren't able to help you as well as we'd like. If you know a bit about this topic already, please feel free to help to fix it. Some concerns people have are probably located on the talk page."
And then the mass of other stuff - {{npov}}, {{unverified}}, {{notability}}, etc could all move to the talk page. This puts a reader-friendly face forward, while retaining the information about what's wrong for editors.
Nice. That's even better. I'd probably make {{notverygood}} less visually intrusive than some of the existing templates. Perhaps a paler blue with no border and italic text rather than roman.
Cons:
* More manual labor when tagging and untagging articles * Possibility for main page and talk page to be out of sync * Easier to forget to remove a tag after cleaning things up * Won't work well with in-section warnings
Pros:
* Less cruft for readers to deal with * Less confusion and upset when something is inappropriately tagged * Draws concerned parties into the talk page rather than arguing through templates
Another possibility that occurs to me. Could we do a little stylesheet and JavaScript magic to hide the specific warning templates unless people click on something in the {{notverygood}} box? That would let us keep them as part of the main article, but make them invisible to casual readers. Further magic would make them by default available to logged-in editors.
William