User:Richard001/Maintenance

This is an essay I have split off from my user page as it was getting too long. Please comment and contribute.

People mess around with articles, and, too often, they stay like that for a long while. To be taken seriously we need to get better at stopping this. One problem is that a given article is not really anybody's responsibility, and so when a given article gets vandalized, nobody is responsible for cleaning it up. What are we going to do about this? I for one would not get on board a plane that had no pilot, or invest in a company that had no directors. Why should we expect our articles to improve or even not deteriorate when they have nobody maintaining them - no stewards? Of course, many articles do have unofficial 'stewards' (though since they have no official responsibility they may often neglect their duties), but there is no reasonable way of finding out if any article does have a person or people taking care of it, and if so who they are. And, too often, the lighthouse is empty. Note that such stewards would not "own" an article, they would just be there to make it, shall we say, "not suck". Unfortunately there are few apt words that don't also suggest ownership, even though the role is like being the cleaner of a building, not its owner.

What happens when pages aren't maintained?

Limiting factor was vandalized twice by an IP [1][2], then by another [3]. This was followed by a revert of only the most recent vandal (see above, 'reverting vandalism'). Following this, it was without references or even a category. It remained in this state for a couple of weeks until I noticed. Being familiar with what the article looked like I knew something was wrong and headed straight to the page history, but most editors wouldn't realize there was anything wrong. If the article had somebody looking after it this sort of thing would never have happened, and who knows how much longer it might have remained like this? (Next time I'll wait and see myself). Years of progress can be removed by a vandal instantly, and with 'nobody at home' there is little that is actually done about it. We easily have enough Wikipedians to maintain each and every article here; these lapses are intolerable.

What would maintainers do?

A maintainer keeps a page tidy; they do not own it.

Maintainers, stewards, pagemaids or whatever you like to call them would revert vandalism and remove material that uncontroversially make the article worse. They would also work on keeping the article in good shape, for example edits can often add useful information to an article, but do so in a somewhat clumsy way. Maintainers would try to harmonize new material with the rest of the article, making it a cohesive whole rather than disparate factoids thrown together by various editors. Ideally, they may also work on improving the article and have a good knowledge of the subject, but this is not a requirement. Maintenance goes beyond the content page, though. Maintainers would also watch the talk page, reply to questions, keep the talk page tidy (e.g. moving comments placed at the top to the bottom) move older material to the archives regularly. Ideally they would be familiar with the page's talk history too, but again this isn't a requirement. Non-article pages also need maintenance, e.g. policy pages etc. Such pagekeepers would have no more authority than they otherwise would. Unless they have some particular claim to authority (e.g. being verified as the world's foremost expert on the subject in question), they would simply have the same say in discussion as anyone else (as with recent changes patrollers and administrators).

Don't we already have maintainers?

We have people informally doing this sort of thing, but often they only perform some of these roles, and only some of the time. And, in case you haven't already noticed, most articles have nothing close to a maintainer. I think they should all have one, and ideally several, especially the more important pages.

How would maintainers be identified

It is very important that such maintainers be identifiable, otherwise nobody knows whether a page is even being maintained. I think the best place for this is the talk page. At the moment we have the imperfect {{maintained}}, which boxes the maintainer into a specific role that they may not want (and hence they'll avoid using the template). Multiple versions are needed so that the template can accurately describe the role of the maintainer(s). The message could also be conveyed via WikiProject banners, e.g. |maintainer = [User name] to produce 'This article is maintained by User:XYZ' or 'This article is being maintained [show details]'.

Maintainers may not want to 'advertise' so boldly, though I can't think of any simple way to avoid this. Other arrangements can be imagined, and as long as there is a way for people to tell whether an article is maintained (and if so by who) they can achieve the same purpose as a talk page notice, though people who are not 'in the know' may find this information more difficult to find.

Rights and responsibilities

Maintainers would have no additional 'rights' (though rollback might be useful), although they would be taking on certain responsibilities by being a maintainer. They would be accountable for keeping the article and its talk page in good condition, and could be removed if they become inactive. As things stand, nobody is accountable for any articles here, so when things go bad in whatever way we have nobody to complain to and can only try to fix the situation ourselves or just leave things as they are.

What to do if the maintainer disappears

Article maintenance is something that requires regular review of changes. Maintainers who go away for a while should disclaim their stewardship of articles. But even if they don't, this should be done automatically. There is no point saying someone is maintaining an article if they haven't been here for six months.

The need for a Wikipedia page on maintenance

There needs to be Wikipedia namespace page that clarifies this issue. At present all we seem to have is template:maintained and this material here. Perhaps a section under WP:OWN would be a start? Hopefully I have clarified the difference.