Thanks for that. And for looking into the history of that. The fact that the tag stayed there for so long doesn't surprise me at all. Most casual editors, if they don't know how the system works, will assume that someone else will deal with the tag and eventually remove it. This is one reason backlogs got so big, because only a small proportion of editors actually use the tags and their workflows in a systematic manner, and this doesn't include the vast majority of casual editors.
One other thing has struck me about the reliability of tagging, and that is the fact that most of the articles I use to look up stuff most days (from high-traffic articles to relatively obscure stuff) tends not to have tags (though some do). I think this is an indication in same way that stuff that people look at and care about gets edited and improved enough that they don't get tagged (or the tags are removed), but that stuff that is tagged but not fixed may tend to be the stuff that readers and editors don't really care about enough (again, stats of article traffic for the backlogs would help immensely here). The few times I've dipped into the backlog, I've recoiled at the stuff being written about and then tagged as they are mostly borderline notable and I just can't bring myself to help out with stuff that frankly arouses no interest in me and I'm never likely to need to refer to as a reader. The backlog I dipped into was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections Selecting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections_from_October_2009 And the articles I looked at were: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Pace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Palackal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palamaneri In all three cases, I struggled to convince myself that editing these articles would be a good use of my time. I then got briefly excited when I spotted this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulovsky_expedition But then I realised that the expedition never took place (though to be fair, it is more interesting than it looks, and I might go back to that one). My point being that unless people are very disciplined, they will work best on what interests them, and I suspect large parts of the older bits of the backlogs are obscure articles of borderline notability that no-one can summon up enough motivation to work on. Carcharoth On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 4:33 AM, David Goodman <dgge...@gmail.com> wrote: > I removed the tag. It was added in 2009 by a usually reliable editor, > [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harry_Kroto&diff=next&oldid=291030877], > at a time when the bio had only one indisputably reliable source, the > Nobel biography, and a number of good sources marked as external > links, such as a BBC interview with him, the profiles of him at his > several universities, and a page listing him from the Royal Society . > I consider the addditon of the tag more than a little > hyper-critical, and I'm surprised none of the many who must have seen > it did not take the opportunity to remove it. By now the p. has a > number of additional formal references documenting particular aspects, > but the basic facts are all in the Nobel bio. > > On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com> > wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Tony Sidaway <tonysida...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Harry Kroto. >>> >>> 'Kroto shared his views on what he calls the "GooYouWiki-Revolution" >>> and spoke highly of Wikipedia as a resource. >>> "In my field," said Kroto, "it's more reliable than the textbooks."' >>> >>> http://www.reflector-online.com/life/wikipedia-not-all-bad-even-sexy-1.2665094 >> >> Though his article has been tagged since May 2009 with {{BLP sources}}. >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Kroto >> >> I wonder if that is back of the backlog mentioned in other posts, or >> an example of over-zealous tagging? >> >> I might try and tidy that article up if no-one else gets there first. >> >> Carcharoth >> >> _______________________________________________ >> WikiEN-l mailing list >> WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >> > > > > -- > David Goodman > > DGG at the enWP > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
