On 10/12/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
What I'm thinking of instead is some sort of subscription or commitment thing. I've always wanted to build a Wikipedia bot, so likely I'd take this opportunity. Suggestions welcome!
Yeah, that's what I want, a bot bossing me around! ;) Just kidding, the idea sounds sort of fun. I'm sure a lot of us work only in a particular niche, it might be beneficial to move out of that occasionally.
If this would work it might solve a serious problem I think we have also. Let's call it the magical-wishlist-effect. For example, you *wish* articles were cleaned up, so you make a list of articles that need cleaned up. Then make an easy template so everyone can slap it all over the place, then add awesome parameters like date, then have a bot auto date things, all the while the list gets longer and longer.
This happens because the people that DO cleanup articles are many less than the number who slap that template on, and the time it takes to completely reformat an article is not the same as the time it takes to add a template at the top. There is a complete decoupling of the queued work amount with the resources available to do it.
So, here's my pie-in-the-sky suggestion completely lacking implementation details (naturally) :D
I think somehow we should link these. If cleanup has a huge backlog, {{cleanup}} should stop working until it's fixed. This will serve as a message that, at the time, people's resources would be better spent cleaning articles rather than tagging them. Likewise tasks that are not sustainable are recognized early rather than after the backlog is completely unmanageable.
We need to learn a little more from biology I think, bossing people around probably won't work. Better to make obvious with signaling what needs to be done, and make the act of inappropriate signaling (flagging things for processing without the required resources) less possible.