Article ownership Re: avoiding forks (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] public service ads in Wikipedia?)

[Delirium]

Stirling Newberry wrote:

> I feel the more "automatic" we make the process of "raising a red 
> flag" on an article, the more it will be done rather than edit warring 
> it out.

Something like this would help a great deal, I think.  I've been in a 
few disputes where I was pretty certain that if the wider community was 
aware of the dispute, my position was pretty obviously the way to go, 
but the problem was that I was fighting with the very small group of 
people who cared about the page, who had very particular views.  A 
common way to resolve this in the past has been emailing wikien-l (or 
the appropriate language list) asking people to take a look at the 
article, but as Wikipedia gets bigger this method doesn't scale very 
well, and also tends to result in a lot of content discussion on the 
list that should really be on the talk pages.

-Mark