I think we are experiencing a decrease in volunteer activity; there are ways of measuring that of course, but it is particularly noticeable in editing. Consolidating the areas of focus would probably improve our responsiveness. It is possible the title of Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard should include the word content to clarify its purpose. Also, often a content issue is not a dispute, just a request to improve content. Fred

You mean like an OTRS system or a robot or something? Steven Zhang

On 3 July 2012 13:11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: I thought there was a boilerplate response on content issues (other than legal or BLP) that said "so fix it". - d.

On 3 July 2012 13:11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: OTRS could be set up to work in this way, as a tracking system for reported problems, but it's not currently used for it. Likewise, we could use Bugzilla. Neither of these would be a very *useful* tool for it, though! ;-) We have a surprising number of ways of tracking issues in articles. To name all the ones I can think of in a few minutes... 1) Tags inside the article 2) Tags on the talkpage 3) Comments on the talkpage 4) Discussions on related pages 5) Central maintenance reports 6) Individual to-do lists 7) Project to-do lists 8) OTRS correspondence 9) Bugzilla 10) AFT comments Some of these generate logs (ie categories or OTRS queues), some don't. None of them talk to each other very well; it's quite possible that a given article could have different problems flagged in different places. Very few of them have a clear mechanism for marking as resolved, and so can remain as open tasks long after the issue is resolved - we've discussed the problem of "tag lag" before. All of these make our to-do worklists unfriendly, disorienting, and somewhat unpleasant to use. It is possible to imagine a workflow management system which absorbed several of these mechanisms, to provide a centralised list of all open issues and manage the relationship between articles and problems. ("This page is [[John Smith]]. The following issues are currently open: * the page is marked for cleanup; * it needs a photograph; * there is an ongoing RFC about the scope of the article on talk; * there is a related move discussion at X; * it is in the death anomalies report; * 3 users have marked it for followup; * it is on a cleanup list at WikiProject Biography; * there is an OTRS ticket at Y; * there are two unresolved AFT comments pending") ...but, the sheer scale of the number of articles and the relatively limited number of users suggest that any such system would be fairly ineffective. It's an awful lot of bureaucratic overhead, especially for something that is fundamentally still a wiki and continually under change! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 7/3/12, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the case of Georg Andreas Böckler I asked the article creator (only two edits here in 2011 and none in 2012, probably more active on the Dutch Wikipedia, where I may try and contact them). I could also ask on the German Wikipedia. I have (only recently) asked on the WikiProject Biography page, but am a bit stuck as to what other WikiProjects to ask at (History of Science? Architecture?). Hadn't thought of the 'relevant related ones' approach. Good point. Patience *is* a virtue. :-) Carcharoth

There has been some response now at the article talk page. It would be nice to know exactly what caused it, hopefully it was the WP:Biography note that drew more people towards this. I have found a source from 1998 (i.e. pre-Wikipedia) that gives the 1617 and 1687 dates. So presumably there is some basis for that. Though possibly this is one of those cases where earlier scholarship was too precise, and later scholarship has made things vague again. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bizrAAAAMAAJ&q=B%C3%B6ckler+1687 That source is "The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection: Northern European books, sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries". "Comprised of nearly 750 volumes housed at the National Gallery of Art, the Millard Collection is one of the finest private collections of rare illustrated books and bound series of prints on European architecture, design, and topography. This series catalogues each of these beautiful and influential books, carefully describing and illustrating them." That sounds reliable. Carcharoth On 7/3/12, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote: