[WikiEN-l] Bureaucratic approach considered harmful (was: Rampant Deletionism)

Fri Nov 7 14:29:40 UTC 2003

Ray (Eclectology) begs us to stop begging the question: 

"How do we make 'Articles needing attention' more functional?"

Well, the problem is that we are trying to take too much of a
bureaucratic approach. Categorize an article by the type of problem you
feel it represents, and hope someone will take care of it.

That would work fine, if we had a fully-staffed help desk. The assigned
copy-editors would fix spelling, punctuation, grammar and such whenever
someone posted an article at [[Wikipedia:articles needing
copy-editing]]. The assigned NPOV experts would neutralize any article
having NPOV problems; and so on.

The problem, I say again, is that we don't have a fully-staffed help
desk. We are not a bureaucracy, let alone a professional one like EB or
the NY Times. We're terribly understaffed, and frightfully disorganized
(even polarized!).

My solution:

We are still small enough that everyone knows each other -- or can get
acquainted quickly enough. I suggest that when an article has a problem,
we simply refer it to a person who we know is able and willing to fix
it.

The form of the request goes something like, "Hey, user:X, can you take
a look at [[article Y]]? It lacks coherence/neutrality/detail..."

Personally,

Ed Poor (aka Uncle Ed)