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

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Thank-you for confirming from your OTRS experience that this is an
actual problem.

<snip>

> 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!

Interesting. Hadn't thought of that.

> 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...

+1

In fact, +100.

Carcharoth