At 12:32 PM 8/25/2004 -0400, Delirium wrote:
I think this is definitely true, and not just because
people misperceive
that they have to act now. Things get caught on recent changes and new
articles, but if they don't get caught there, they often essentially never
get caught. When using the "random pages" feature (as I do quite a bit),
I've run into complete junk, sometimes outright vandalism (like "bob is
gay") that has been there since _2002_.
Cleanup is supposed to address some of this problem, but I'm not qualified
to say whether it's worked or not.
Here's an idea; how about adding a "summon editor attention" link or button
that places the article into a page similar to recentchanges? This way
people who can't or won't fix an article's problems can still very easily
get it noticed by others who might, without all the hassle of going to the
Cleanup page and editing it. This'd be a really quick and dirty way of
saying "hey, I found something that looks broken!", and if it's easy enough
it might even get used by anonymous browsers who otherwise wouldn't bother
to contribute to Wikipedia at all. One shouldn't even need to type in a
reason why attention is being called, since in theory this is for pointing
out obvious stuff.
I suppose it could be abused by spamming the "recentattention" queue with
articles that don't actually need it, but it'd take a pretty dedicated
abuser to make recentattention flood faster than recentchanges does. :)
Since clicking the link doesn't actually do anything to the article, and
stuff on recentattention would drop off on its own after a few days anyway,
I don't see how spamming would do any lasting harm.