Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:46, 26 March 2007

Introductory comments

I have proposed a policy proposal on Misplaced Pages:Readability that contains two provisions. The proposal is here. Feel free to discuss them on this page.

The policy proposal is also posted on Village pump. Wooyi 22:23, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't really like the first provision. Some articles/sections need a lot of work. I would support it if the number was higher, like no more than 3. If an article needs 4 cleanup templates, it could just use {{rewrite}}. As for the second provision, I can't think of many examples of this. Most articles that have really long lists are lists and most articles with a ton of external links can usually have most of them removed as spam. If most of the article consists of external links, the whole article could probably be PROD-ed or taken to AfD as its probably all spam. Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 22:31, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

The second seems sensible (with the obvious exception of "List of ..."). The first, however, is totally unworkable. You're essentially saying that if I come across an article with two cleanup tags on it, and it happens to fail NPOV, I can't tag it as such. Chris cheese whine 23:05, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that too many boxes are distracting, but I think that 3 is probably a better limit than 2. I would suggest that if more are needed that they should be directed to the talk page of the article. One other thing to think about is the use of these on stubs vs. more established articles. Often stubs have many boxes early on that are placed by new page patrollers, so if the goal is to impact this behavior, the NPP community should probably be involved in this discussion. --After Midnight 00:17, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Strong Oppose on both counts; misuse of template

1. Dispute and cleanup tags exist for a reason, to vividly identify article problems and attract readers to fix them. There is no reason to limit the number of problems to be identified. This is like saying that if you get robbed 5 times in one month, you just have to STFU after 2 police reports. The argument that "it makes the articles" ugly is of no consequence. The point is to make the articles ugly to inspire action to clean them up, and to alert readers potentially depending on the article that they should be cautious, about what, and why.
2. Many articles are lists. I don't know what else to say. If this proposal went through, List of World Snooker Champions would have to be deleted or reduced to a couple of sentences about the concept, but no lists of the champions, or filled with endless streams of non-encyclopedic blather to meet the proposed ratio requirement.
3. I have removed the {{Proposal}} tag. That is for entire documents with well-formed, compelete contents and rationales, that have already had broad community input and are believed ready by a significant number of editors for designation as a policy or guideline, not for random ideas-of-the-moment embedded somewhere in one-editor essays. Things like this should simply be discussed as topics in WP:VPP.  :-)

— SMcCandlish ツ 00:28, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment sorry for the misuse of template, I wasn't aware of that. Regarding to the list articles, I have just made that exception in the proposal. And also while some warning boxes are needed, it impairs a reader's interest to read it, as that he would think "oh this article is so bad i will come back and read it after it gets revised", and nothing gets done. I do agree that the limit number might raise to 3 though. Wooyi 00:35, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Tags telling people an article is a problem is a good thing

A haven't seen any evidence of the assumed premise that multiple cleanup tags are so bothersome they would drive people away from the article; tags that render the article "inconvenient to read." I imagine if the person is at a particular article for encyclopedic information and the article has many tags, then they would leave not because a few tags can't be scrolled past but because they read those tags (unreferenced; not factually accurate; hoax; poor tone; not written in formal tone...); and come to the very likely correct conclusion that the article is not a reliable source of information—that is the proper result. A person on a hunt for reliable encyclopedic information is well warned that a multi-tagged article does not fit the bill. If, on the other hand, the person is a user, or someone who understands the purpose of the site and is of a mindset to become a user, then the tags serve the purpose of marking the article's problems for what we do as users or soon to become users. In either case, the tags tell us, here be demons, and it should be no other way. So, if the intent of the reader is to edit, I can't see how the tags will make them lose interest, and if the intent of the reader is to read an proper encyclopedia article, they shouldn't read that article; we should want them to lose interest and move on for real content.

I also think not having the tags could be actively harmful for our imaginary "encyclopedic reader." Let's imagine a person who has never heard of Misplaced Pages and has just come across one of the numerous online articles trashing Misplaced Pages for its unreliable content. So they make it here for the first time, hit random page, and land on one of the hundreds of thousands of unsourced, poorly-written, stubby articles that haunt this site and which happens to have no cleanup tags. If no tags are present, they might take that untagged article as a perfect confirmation that Misplaced Pages is as a whole as they read it described— unreliable, unsourced, etc. However, with the tags in place the natural conclusion is "oh, this is an unfinished article in development" and that reader moving on to look at other articles (maybe finding an FA or other great content thereafter) is more likely. Accordingly, I disagree with the basic assumptions underlying this essay.--Fuhghettaboutit 12:46, 26 March 2007 (UTC)