On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:
I'm looking at the various maintenance
templates [...] wouldn't we
want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never
sees it unless the go looking?
Another thought on this topic.
What if we replaced all of our problem tags with something generic -
{{notverygood}} or something. I'm thinking wording along the lines of:
"This article isn't very good yet. If you came here to learn about
this topic, we apologize that we aren't able to help you as well as
we'd like. If you know a bit about this topic already, please feel
free to help to fix it. Some concerns people have are probably
located on the talk page."
And then the mass of other stuff - {{npov}}, {{unverified}},
{{notability}}, etc could all move to the talk page. This puts a
reader-friendly face forward, while retaining the information about
what's wrong for editors.
Nice. That's even better. I'd probably make {{notverygood}} less
visually intrusive than some of the existing templates. Perhaps a paler
blue with no border and italic text rather than roman.
Cons:
* More manual labor when tagging and untagging articles
* Possibility for main page and talk page to be out of sync
* Easier to forget to remove a tag after cleaning things up
* Won't work well with in-section warnings
Pros:
* Less cruft for readers to deal with
* Less confusion and upset when something is inappropriately tagged
* Draws concerned parties into the talk page rather than arguing
through templates
Another possibility that occurs to me. Could we do a little stylesheet
and JavaScript magic to hide the specific warning templates unless
people click on something in the {{notverygood}} box? That would let us
keep them as part of the main article, but make them invisible to casual
readers. Further magic would make them by default available to logged-in
editors.
William