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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/03/11 5:31 AM, Andrew Gray 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.
>
> 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!

Even if you can get past this technical hurdle, the social/intellectual 
one will still be there.  I certainly don't want to spend a lot of time 
trying to second guess the individual who put up the banner. Perhaps 
I've only fixed the problem in the one part of the article where I can 
help, and left the rest for others without seriously looking at the rest 
of the article. Completely resolving the problems is a often an 
accumulation of multiple efforts. If I'm not editing in response to the 
tag I'll more likely ignore it completely,  It's fair enough to believe 
that the people who put up the tags are the best ones to remove them. 
Adding tags should accomplish more than generating work for other people.

Ray