[WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)

[Andrew Gray]

On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

> safe and then move on". And then someone else, later, might fix the
> article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and
> not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no,
> really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others
> to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you
> should come back and assess whether it is still needed).

There's also a widespread belief that "I shouldn't/can't remove them".
I regularly see emails in OTRS saying "I've fixed X page, but the tags
are still there, can you check it out"; I've seen it occasionally on
talkpages as well, though it's less common.

This may be because people believe -

a) the tags are "official", & need third party review before they can
be removed (to confirm the problem's gone); or
b) tags are automatically generated, and that since they're still
there after they've made changes, the articles obviously not fixed
"enough" yet.

Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly
don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit
links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the
"zeroth section" of the article. If you don't see the template when
you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed.
- and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to
get to it, you're stuck!

Working on the assumption that there are people who want to remove
templates but are having problems doing so, one solution here might be
to build on the (excellent) work that's been done with HotCat, and
implement a "remove this tag" link on the template itself. Click this,
you get a little line saying "are the problems still here?", click
yes, and it loads-and-saves the change in the same way that a HotCat
category change works.

Thoughts? This would be one way to get our readers to do the triage
and cleanup for us...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk