User talk:Richard001/Maintenance

Maintainers

One problem with identifying "maintainers" of a page is that articles which don't have such maintainers may be targeted by vandals. This is one reason why we don't provide a method of determining how many people are watchlisting an article (however, a practically-useless report of unwatchlisted articles is available to admins).

I think the proposals for Wikipedia:Flagged revisions, in some form, may come closer to satisfying your requirements. If the majority of readers of Wikipedia (ie those who are not logged into an account) see only the most recent flagged version of an article, then vandalism or POV edits will count for much less than they do now. This is not the only way that Flagged revisions might work. There is also the possibility that this feature might discourage anon edits, and thus reduce the number of new editors joining Wikipedia.-gadfium 09:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

With articles that don't have maintainers on the talk page, there is still no guarantee that nobody maintains the article. Even if every maintainer identified themselves, there would still be a lot of people who watch the article but don't specifically identify themselves as maintainers because they are not prepared to take on such a commitment (I watch probably over 100 mainspace pages myself, but I would only be willing to be a 'maintainer' of a much smaller number. And this is only in the ideal situation where all maintainers were identifiable.

Even in such a situation, it's not clear that vandalism would be much of an issue. Vandals might be discouraged from vandalizing the more viewed articles if they are maintained, which would balance out possibly increased vandalism of less important articles. In addition, I'm skeptical that the average vandal (who is what, a 15 year old school boy?) would actually know about article maintenance, even if it was visible on talk pages. And finally, by the time the system was expanded enough to become generally known, even by some vandals, we could quickly close up the gaps and get all articles maintained.

There is also the option of being slightly more stealthy about it, e.g. have maintenance information on a subpage or on a WikiProject list, so that almost all vandals would not be able to find it. We could also make the information visible only to people with accounts, perhaps with extra criteria (e.g. 50 edits) etc.

The flagged revisions thing has been 'coming soon' for about a year, so I don't have very high expectations of it (and think this system would be a lot simpler and easier). Then again, the unified login system has finally come to be, so it might appear one day (maybe around 2011?) Richard001 (talk) 03:16, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We have something like 3-4000 highly active users, and approaching 2.5 million articles. Each highly active user would need to maintain at least 600 articles, and in practice more than this, since some articles would have many people wishing to assist. Many newly created articles are on relatively obscure sportspeople/bands/localities (take a look at WP:NNZ); very few people would have the expertise to maintain these, although well-sourced articles are much easier to patrol.

Another alternative is to use shared watchlists, such as WP:WNZV. Any editor can add any New Zealand-related article to this, and it effectively becomes part of my watchlist (on top of the 3500 articles on my private watchlist). I don't know if any other editors use this particular watchlist; Simon Lyall might, as he links to it from his user page. Such shared watchlists should be part of WikiProjects.

I am frustrated with the slow overall progress of flagged revisions, but they were only approved for general use four days ago. I think we'll see something adopted on en: within a year, or else a permanent deadlock on getting agreement for their use, which may result in the number of indefinite semi-protected articles growing exponentially. I currently have two articles indef semi-protected (New Zealand and Helen Clark), but a few months ago I had none.-gadfium 03:57, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

related template proposal

Hi, can't find the place to instigate discussion about a template - similar to maintained - but without editors listed or requirements for knowledge on subject denying ownership, best place I could find was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Denial_of_ownership_advice_or_template.3F, would like to know what you think LeeVJ (talk) 17:56, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]