The only reason for specialization is that currently {{cleanup}} is
applied to hundreds and hundreds of articles, many of which are not
very high-profile and thus not high-priority. I don't think it's the
end-all solution but it seemed like a reasonable change to make.
It seems to me that cleanup in general has two purposes: one, to
indicate that it is known that a particular article is in a state of
disrepair and to help encourage people who stumble across that article
to repair it. The second is to give people interested in generally
improving Wikipedia the ability to find articles which could use
attention.
The advantage of a little specialization would, I believe, be to aid
the latter usage more than the former. All of the characters and
topics in the "priority" category are also so well known that there
are literally dozens of books written on them, they are present in
every other encyclopedia available, and there are hundreds upon
hundreds of webpages on them. Writing a biography of [[Bill Gates]]
takes no specialized knowledge or training. I was able to add a
substantial amount to the article just by cutting and pasting content
from the other articles we have relating to Microsoft (Microsoft,
History of Microsoft Windows, and United States v. Microsoft,
specifically). That took about 15 minutes worth of work. This is stuff
*anyone* can do if they want to.
"If they want to" is of course the operative part. Specialization can
be enabling -- *if* someone wants to work on a general article, it's a
good way to direct them to things which need attention -- but it does
not compel action in and of itself. That's a bigger question, and
worth thinking about seriously, though I don't have any specific ideas
regarding it at the moment, personally.
FF
On 10/7/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Further specialization in process may help, but thats
only part of it. Some would say its just more "process
creep", and I tend to think the truth somewhere in the
middle between process upgrades and guidance upgrades.
IAC I think I need to apologise for my earlier
comment, "please forgive us..." which was indeed a bit
snippy (though quite edited down from what I had in
the draft :|). Our traditional proper response to
anyone has traditionally been "{{sofixit}}" and it
should remain so, regardless of who makes the
criticism. There are in fact only two--exactly
two--kinds of people in this world: Those who edit
Wikipedia and those who dont.
And furthermore, I think ATP focusing on particular
articles ("the pick on a crappy article game" -
Flcello) at this point is rather useless, when there
are indeed bigger fish to fry --considering my opening
point, namely that stuff needs' be done.
Sincerely,
SV
--- Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That's the list I was thinking of. The
cleanup
process is currently so
bogged down that it's hard to know what needs to be
done, though. In
the meantime, I've created a template --
{{cleanup-priority}}, which
currently is a cleanup tag for any articles which
are of sub-par
quality on that list (and should only be limited to
that list, I
think), hopefully it will help focus things a bit.
(If people disagree
with the "prioritization", well, they can argue that
on the list
itself -- if we have such a list, and take it at
least partially
seriously, then I think using it as a base for a
prioritization scheme
is a good idea).
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