[Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people

[David Gerard]

2009/3/2  <jim at scrubnugget.com>:

> As it's written now, the contact form probably wouldn't work for enwiki:
> it would condense most English-language traffic to a single address.  In
> the past, a single incoming address has caused us to lose urgent BLP-ish
> messages in the larger flood of vandalism reports and reference-desk
> questions; this is precisely why we have several contact addresses for
> English-language issues.  If we could have distinct forms for different
> types of issue, though, or if we could have the end user select the
> relevant queue from a list, then that form might be an option for enwiki.


That could be a simple drop-down in the form for type of query. (If
queues don't map well to common query types, that's another problem.)


> I agree that the current enwiki contact page is definitely less than
> optimal.  During an odd lull a while back, I started a rewrite at
> [[w:en:Contact us/temp]]; the main ideas were to defer to the FAQs and
> remind people that most problems can be solved on-wiki.  (I had to set the
> rewrite aside when OTRS traffic picked up again.)  The temp page is
> currently open for editing if anybody would like to contribute.


I just went to get some actual data. Here's the stats.grok.se hit
count for [[:en:Wikipedia:Contact us]] and its subpages:

232227 Wikipedia:Contact us
    - ranked #366 page on Wikipedia for Feb 2009
2230   Wikipedia:Contact us/account questions
7773   Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem
2016   Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Copyright
472    Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Delete or undelete
1793   Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Factual error
620    Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Factual error (from enterprise)
1196   Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Factual error (from subject)
474    Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_problem/Google_Earth
428    Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/No article
711    Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Poorly written
1967   Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Vandalism
2021   Wikipedia:Contact us/blocked
2718   Wikipedia:Contact us/Contact a user
2160   Wikipedia:Contact us/Links
1893   Wikipedia:Contact us/login problems
3106   Wikipedia:Contact us/other
6704   Wikipedia:Contact us/Photo submission
3570   Wikipedia:Contact us/Top questions
2228   Wikipedia:Contact us/Warning messages

I'd say from the number of hits and the ranking that the "Contact
Wikipedia" link is reasonably useful and discoverable.

Note that "Factual error (from subject)" - the page with what to do
about a bad article about oneself - is buried about four pages down.
Would it be a good idea to link it more prominently directly from
"Contact us"?

We could make a "Report a problem with this article" link in the
sidebar that goes straight to [[Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem]]
and see how that goes. (Four pages of links is plenty for people to
get lost in.) Do you think this would flood OTRS with rubbish, though?


- d.