Wikipedia:Cleanup sorting/History

This page contains material moved from Cleanup process/Cleanup sorting proposal when it became Cleanup sorting. It contains some useful background and shows some of the proposed ideas before the current approach evolved.

Urgent nature of the crisis


The graph at right starkly illustrates the problem. From May, 2005, to March, 2006, Wikipedia as a whole has grown only about two-fold (blue line). But in the same time period, the number of articles tagged for cleanup per month has grown sixfold (purple line). If we were clearing six articles from cleanup for every article created, this would be fine; but such is not the case. As a result, the cleanup backlog has grown at an faster rate: Cleanup has expanded twenty-five fold since May, 2005 (yellow line)!

The implication is clear: if we do not take action to improve the Cleanup process, the quality of Wikipedia will steadily degrade.

To clear the backlog, Cleanup must work faster than the addition of new articles. So far, the Wikipedia community has failed to achieve a fast Cleanup turnover, despite the attention lavished on the problem.

Previous attempts
The Cleanup disaster is not a new issue, and previous moves have been made:


 * Specialized tags such as, , and exist to classify Cleanup articles by problem. In fact, an entire constellation of specialized tags has been created at Cleanup resources.


 * One early system for dealing with cleanup was the Cleanup Taskforce. Under this model, an article would be assigned to a taskforce member for cleanup. As of today, the system appears defunct.


 * When the backlog began to be noticed, User:Beland directed his bot, User:Pearle, to sort the backlog of Cleanup into . This highlighted the problem but did little to solve it. Requests continued to pour in at a higher rate than interested parties could fix.

Previous discussion of topic-specific cleanup

 * In August 2005, User:Visviva suggested topic-specific sorting of Cleanup articles. While the idea received substantial support, discussion died around October for lack of implementation. The visibility of the Cleanup project as a whole, as well as its growing crisis, was a major problem, but most Cleanup Wikipedians continued to devote most of their efforts to holding the dike against the oncoming flood of cleanup requests.


 * Other historical discussion of the problem may be found at Wikipedia talk:Cleanup, User talk:Jekoko/Cleanup links, Wikipedia talk:Pages needing attention.


 * A currently active idea is to sort articles by month, as Cleanup is currently sorted. See Category talk:Articles that need to be wikified.

Difficult to automate
As desirable as it would be, Cleanup cannot be completely automated. Cleanup, taken as a whole, requires many decisions that are content-specific, such as wikification, bolding of the main topic, grammar and style editing, and clarification. Additionally, since most articles sent to Cleanup are poorly formatted or unformatted, most of the handles used by bots to sort articles into categories are not present. Some classifications can and should be bot-automated. I and User:Eagle 101 are working on one bot to automate some sorting (wikification needs, images for cleanup, etc.). User:Bluemoose has a Bluebot that does some similar tasks. However, the possible applications are few. (See Wikipedia talk:Cleanup for what we think can be automated. If we've missed something, let us know.) Other tasks can be machine-aided with tools such as AutoWikiBrowser, if only we can get enough AWB-assisted editors engaged in the Cleanup process.

Proposed: a clear workflow for article improvement
There already exists one set of pages that address topic-specific editing needs, namely Pages needing attention. These pages are also showing a backlog, and are currently maintained haphazardly. Meanwhile, we have active WikiProjects whose primary goal is to improve articles in active collaboration on a single topic.

I propose that we improve the flow of articles from a vague basket marked "Cleanup" to the editors who are most interested in improving those articles:

Cleanup -> Attention -> WikiProject

 * Wikiproject Cleanup sorting:The purpose of Cleanup would be refocused from trying to fix the articles to sorting the articles. In a system similar to WikiProject Stub sorting and perhaps associated with it, Cleanup would sort articles by need (wikify, redlink removal, copyediting, etc.) and by topic (New York City, say, or Environment, or Star Wars).


 * New role for WP:PNA: The articles from Cleanup would be sorted into the appropriate page on Pages needing attention. Attention would become more active and better maintained, as it would become a regular part of the improvement process. Attention would become one of the primary focus pages for Wikipedians seeking to improve, rather than expand, the content of Wikipedia.


 * Wikiprojects adopt an attention page: It would be a priority to associate Attention pages with their corresponding Wikiproject, if any. The incoming flow of pages from Cleanup to their own Attention page, maintained not just by Wikiproject volunteers but by editors across Wikipedia, would give a rich field of material for individual Wikiprojects to work on, and encourage them (as their contributions are desperately needed).

Expert attention

 * Flow from WP:PNA to : Once a page is well wikified and edited, if it still needs more material, it would graduate to an  tag. This would be point at which outside sources (and even outside collaborators!), as well as expert Wikipedians, would be called in to gin up the article.

Outside review

 * Aim for quality status: Finally, it is suggested that the notional end of the pipeline be a submission to Featured article candidates, Peer review, or other content review systems. While this might be a high bar for articles coming off of Cleanup, it is the ultimate aim of Wikipedia: to have an entire encyclopedia produced to FA/peer-reivewed status. Sure, a lot of articles won't get there, but it's important to remember what the goal is.

Overall
The general idea is to harmonize the many, many projects we have devoted to Wikipedia improvement. Cleanup, Attention, WikiProjects, and other efforts are all effective in their own small way. However, because there is no clear system for deciding who can best work on what, many articles get left sitting for months in backlogs.

For deleting articles, we have a clear pathway for articles to take: Speedy deletion or Proposed deletion, which if contested goes to Articles for deletion, and can be appealed at Deletion review. Likewise, for dispute resolution, we have a clear pathway from discussion and warnings, through Requests for comment and Requests for mediation, to the ultimate Requests for arbitration. Shouldn't we have a similar, clearly defined pathway for article improvement?

Submitted for discussion by Alba 06:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

But won't this flood WP:PNA with poor and unwikified articles?
That's not a bug, that's a feature. Key to this proposal is the idea that people interested in a topic will be more likely to improve it than someone working only on a vaguely defined "cleanup", or on "grammar" or "copyediting", which are tedious tasks when you don't care what the text is about. WikiProjects exist for these issues, too; we should direct work on them to people who care about them.

Under this proposal, Attention is split into two levels, with Attention being less refined than Expert Attention. I wouldn't be ashamed to see an article tagged both and, but would be appalled to see  and  together.Alba 06:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

How dare you try to impose a straightjacket on my editing habits!
Well, if you don't like my idea, I suggest you be bold and ignore all rules. Some people will anyway! This proposal, though, is meant more to catch all the articles you aren't just all fired-up to fix.

With apologies to MasterCard and the BJAODN folks: ''There are some article fixes Wikipedia can't buy. For everything else, there's Cleanup and Pages needing attention.'' Alba 04:32, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup tag
Per the discussions on the talk page, the cleanup and cleanup-date tags are proposed to be changed to something that describes the edits to be made. Please comment on the proposals below.

Proposal #1
To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup:

You can help! Specify the problems, or be bold and fix it yourself! Editing help is available. If this page has been cleaned, please remove this tag, or ask for attention. This article has been tagged since.

Proposal #2
To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. Needs include:  

You can help! Specify the problems, or be bold and fix it yourself! Editing help is available. If this page has been cleaned, please remove this tag, or ask for attention. This article has been tagged since.

Proposal #3
To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup for the following reason:

You can help! Specify the problems, or be bold and fix it yourself! Editing help is available. If this page has been cleaned, please remove this tag, or ask for attention. This article has been tagged since.

Proposal #1
The format below is proposed as the new means of posting to Pages needing attention. It is deliberately modeled on the submission process for AfD, a thoroughly field-tested system. The result should be a set of maintained lists, as in the current Pages needing attention pages, as well as a tag/category system that maintains a dynamic listing of topic-specific listings. Since either humans or bots can affix the tags, this system can be used in either an automated or a hand-operated mode.

Vital to the system are the proposed tags  ] and  , cognate to afd2 and afd1, respectively.

Once this is in place, the categories and lists so generated can be immediately included in all relevant portals, wikiprojects, user watchlists, etc., etc.

To list an article for Pages needing attention, follow this two-step process, replacing PageName with the name of the page to be attended to.

Proposal #2: Tag/Category only
I'm concerned that the direction here is toward a much higher overhead implementation than is desirable or necessary. Use of list pages like now exist under PNA (Pages needing attention/Agriculture, etc) are overly cumbersome to use because they require updates to both article and the list page, and this occurs at both entry-time and at removal-time.

Instead, I think this process should take full advantage of the Category mechanism because this reduces the amount of separate edits needed to just one for entry and one for removal. I'm not sure how to handle the needs areas (like wikify, etc), but at least for topics this should use a pure-category mechanism invoked by a tag. With dates as well, the tag could look something like:

which, besides generating a box on the article, would enter it into appropriate categories as well:

The single edit inserting or removing a simple tag is suitable for human editing. If at some point an ambitious bot programmer could determine an appropriate topic for some articles (say from topical categories that are already referenced by the article), then such a bot could automatically convert tags into the topical-category form. -R. S. Shaw 20:42, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Strong Support. excellent plan, well thought out as far as i can tell. --Quiddity
 * Conditional Support. See my additional suggestions on the talk page.  If these ideas are implemented or clearly shown to be unfeasible, I will change my vote to support. --Danaman5 06:22, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Looks good now.--Danaman5 06:09, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I say go for it. Something to start on may be ships/shipyards, which are all facts and figures but not wikified. Scalene 10:38, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * What happens when there is no wikiproject for the article?Will that article just keep floating in no man's land?--213.224.243.169 11:28, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Then it would be on the list for general cleanup, as Renata wants below. Alba 16:16, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I say it needs much more thinking and work. I don't think it will solve the problem. You will spend tons of time and effort sorting the clean up tags and passing the actual clean up to WikiProjects that might not be active. You mention stub sorting, and I think it is a pretty dumb idea. Instead of spending 1 hour re-sorting stubs (which adds 0 to Wikipedia's encyclopedic value), people should spend 1 hour actually expanding at least one of those. I agree that some cenralised place is needed. But clean up sorting will not help. What have helped and still could help is Maintenance collaboration. Some time in fall it had a huge prominent banner on community portal and attracted tons of attention. Results: about 1000 wikified articles in a week. But then the banner was removed and the collab dies a silent death. I suggest resurrecting it because it was highly effective and actually achieved something. And it was not only "let's sort and pass the hard work to somebody else." Renata 13:48, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Are the two approaches mutually exclusive? I don't think so. We do need general work as well, and getting more attention to the problem would definitely be a help. That's why I posted this to the CP in the first place: this problem is not getting enough attention from the community. On the other hand, your argument rests on the assumption that WikiProjects don't work, or won't process articles. I'm not sure that's true, but tven if that is so, we will still have the sorted lists that will be much easier to work through. I don't think sorting is a waste of time if it breaks the work up into chunks meaningful enough to deal with. Would you rather close out a list of 20 cleanup articles, or reduce the backlog from 11297 to 11277? Alba 16:15, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * My point is: you'll need massive participation in order for this to work. As you said, the backlog is massive. So why have a mass of people spending valuable time sorting things and hoping that someone else will do the hard work, while the same mass of people could be spending time actually fixing the articles.
 * Already there are so many distractions from writing and fixing articles. I don't know about you, but I am watching about 850 articles and already my watchlist is bloated by minor and trivial edits - disambiguation, stub sorting, interwiki links, typos, recently popups assited clean up, etc. etc. I see a non-trivial so rarely that it gets scary sometimes (I'd say about 2-3 times a month). I don't say that all the activities are useless, I say that more time needs to spend writing and fixing not one disambiguation link, but the entire article. Renata 03:36, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I can't disagree, Renata: trivial (but easily automated!) edits *have* started to over-ride the more difficult but more vital task of brute editing. The purpose of this proposal to leverage more editing out of people, starting with the WikiProjects and moving on to the general pool of Wikipedians. I don't think just throwing effort into the problem will solve it: about 2/3 of the articles on Cleanup I pass on, because I don't know enough about the topic to edit properly. These are the pages I want to get sorted, because right now all that effort was wasted. Alba 03:40, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong support. Leverages the incremental amounts of work that people are willing to do for things like Stub Sorting, except that this plan is better from the start than Stub Sorting is now.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  17:07, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I like it. I think it'd break up the cleanup task into much more manageable chunks. One thing I'm unclear on: when exactly would an article get Expert? I woudln't want every stub getting an extra tag. --F a ng Aili 17:52, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I support the endeavor, because any effort is better than no effort, and there is a massive backlog. But I'm not sure that "cleanup" can be as easily sorted as stubs, which are topical.  Sorting by need is just not the same: many of the articles in need of cleanup fall into multiple or all possible needs, while others identified for cleanup have more general needs that can't really be categorized (that is, they just need to be reworked).  Sorting is better than nothing, and delegating cleanup to WikiProjects is definitely a good idea, but I don't see how it's going to do much except reorganize problem. bcasterlinetalk 22:17, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I object to the statistics: there are not more of these articles, but they are better tagged. Still, I agree that something needs to be done. Most of the time, I favor thinking about what to do before doing. but here, that's already been done. We have a well established system of policies, guidelines, and styles. I support any system that delegates these articles to the respective WikiProjects. That figures right in with the talk at WP:SPR: give it to the experts.--HereToHelp 23:41, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong support... Thanks for taking this up.  Since I'm credited above, I'll just mention that I think this is much better than that other idea I had about sorting. I could elaborate, but I imagine the reasons are fairly obvious -- cleanup does not require the kind of regimented procedure that deletion does, and there is no "ticking clock" -- to say nothing of the much lower level of emotional stress.  I don't think that cleanup cats need to be limited to areas with resident WikiProjects, either... we have no general Korea-related WikiProject, but there are a number of editors who would likely keep an eye on a Category:Korea-related article cleanup.  -- Visviva 00:25, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong Support This system is needed to help guide all articles on Wikipedia to a Featured Article status Judgesurreal777 04:23, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * guide all articles on Wikipedia to a Featured Article status?? Frankly I think that is exactly the idea we have to give up. The reason cleanup and wikify categories get out of hand is that too many (bad) articles are added. What we can do is cleanup the ones that are useful, the ones that belong in an encyclopedia. The rest will have to be ignored. And we should seriously think how to avoid bad articles being added. If every article needs a category, then why accept new articles without one? Why not force new articles to contain at least one link? Force the newbie to look up how to add a link and most will probably gladly link the whole article. Or make a step-by step guide to creating an article (select category, type description, related subjects etc.). Or... let administrators decide in one glance whether a new article is acceptable. If not, send back to user with a link to the rule he's breaking. Build a dam instead of pumping water, know what I mean? Because let's be honest: we don't need a million articles. A hunderd thousand good ones will make a fine encyclopedia. Piet 15:19, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Piet, the general goals of Wikipedia are not under discussion here. This is a process proposal discussing implementation. In the defense of the policy in question, FA status is an ideal, and I'm well aware that most articles currently in Cleanup won't get there. We are not discussing policies for new articles or newbie education: I suggest you look at Welcome templates and Village pump (perennial proposals). Most of your ideas have already been discussed before. Alba 16:45, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * My apologies, I got carried away a bit. Piet 21:52, 21 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Support A very interesting proposal. Any change to the current system for cleanup is welcome; I am so glad that someone has taken the initiative. I would be happy to join the Cleanup sorting team now--it is so overwhelming at present! This way, even if I could not possibly cleanup the article on my own, it would be made more visible to others who are better versed in the subject...rather than just being labelled "Cleanup October 2005". If the idea doesn't work out, at least Wikipedia will be moving in some direction. Tamarkot 01:19, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose This means more bureaucracy instead of actually improving articles. Also, most articles are already in categories, so what we need is a way to easily search for articles in category A with a cleanup tag. --Apoc2400 13:12, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
 * That would be nice too, but given that no such system exists and I think it would be difficult to technically implement, why not support this idea too? The point is that the articles aren't getting actually improved. I know I would improve more articles if I could find the ones I was interested in.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  16:08, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
 * It will probably be less formal than described. Basically, the appropriate WikiProjects are given the articles rather than them just sitting there.--HereToHelp 21:41, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
 * This seems like a good idea, and one that will help boost the importance of the portals. It would expose cleanup work to people that may even be new to wikipedia but have subject specific knowledge that may be entering via portals. I think this should be the goal of portals in general, and having some work for people that are interested in the particular topics ready would only help. - cohesion t 09:28, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Support. Would it also be possible to set some bots up that, if the article has certain categories ("physics", "politics", etc; indeed the names of wikiprojects) could make add that article to a list on the Wikiproject page entitled something like "(Wikiproject name here) Articles for Cleanup"? Batmanand | Talk 13:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Support, forget bots, doesn't autowikibrowser have a list making feature that could do something like this?--Rayc 16:36, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong Support Absolutely perfect.--Zxcvbnm 20:33, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong Support I know the reason I don't do as much cleanup as I should/want to is because I have no easy way of getting hold of articles that lie within my expertise. There will be a need for a cleanup category structure much like the stub category structure; it might not be a bad idea to model one on the other. TheGrappler 22:46, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Will definitely be helpful.--Someoneinmyheadbutit&#39;snotme 22:55, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Support, much needed. Phoenix2 00:49, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong Oppose, stub-sorting was a bad idea. Cleanup sortings is just as bad. People should focus on creating encyclopedic content instead of sorting stuff. IMO, it's much more useful to actually *clean* the articles rather than sort them. bogdan 08:41, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
 * As comments above indicate, many users would be more willing to perform the actual cleaning of the articles if this policy was implemented. --Danaman5 06:09, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

PLEASE PLEASE HELP - We are in crisis mode to clean up articles.
 * Strongly Oppose
 * Same as bogdan
 * We don't need another set of gibberish Part of the reason you don't get more help is that things are too darn complicated.  You may not appreciate how discouraging complexity is, for occasional volunteers like myself.
 * I think you might find, as more and more article subjects are taken, people are going to be more willing to do cleanup, especially if you start to emphasize the need for it.
 * If this needs attention, you'd do better to make it a priority on the Community Portal and actually name and link projects to make it easier for people to help. Like:
 * If you are good with English grammar, you can copyedit one of the following even if you don't know much about Wiki (list of maybe 10 copyedit jobs)
 * If you know the basics of Wiki style, please Wikify one of these (list of maybe 10)
 * If you know, or are willing to research, one of the following topics, they badly need some substantive editing

and so on. Apollo 11:28, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I understand what you're saying, Apollo, particularly with your last three bullets. The problem with the cleanup process, however, is that there aren't any wikification/copyediting categories (by this I mean that there is rarely a reason specified in the article explaining what needs to be cleaned up), and as for your last bullet, the articles are not organized by topic, just by date/alphabetization. How will the lists of copyediting/wikification jobs and topics - that you evidently would like to have as well - be created? I think that is what this cleanup sorting thing is all about - to create these lists so that articles in need of cleanup will be easily accessible to those interested in cleanup, rather than being frightened off by the 10000+ backlog (as I am!). Tamarkot 01:50, 3 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Support. We need to get articles to those who actually have the expertise and interest to edit them. It would be good if the articles can be sorted by their categories as well. - 137.189.4.1 02:56, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong support, as I don't see anything in this proposal that would preclude "regular" editors from cleaning up articles, and it helps WikiProjects identify articles in need. This can also help with assessment scales for WikiProjects in the Work via Wikiprojects aspect of WP:1.0. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 06:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Implementation discussion
This is definitely a proposal whose time has come. I've been meaning to implement something like this for a while, but haven't had much time to devote to Wikipedia.

One of the things that the original cleanup-date conversion was intended to accomplish was to free editors from the bureaucratic task of checking to see if which articles on a very long list had been fixed. The practice of tagging an article makes it possible for an article to be automatically removed from the list when the tag is removed from the article itself.

For this proposal to be most helpful, I think it should either use tags and categories instead of static lists, or the lists should be automatically updated by a bot.

If using tags, there are some choices:
 * Create a single tag (cleanup-date-topic?) that will classify an article both by date and by topic.
 * Use one gigantic queue that is sorted in two ways: by cleanup-date tags and by attention-topic tags. Let Pearle deal with cleanup-date, and some new process (whether human, bot, or both) would deal with cleanup-topic.
 * Use the cleanup queue for triage only, with a goal of sorting by topic and re-tagging with attention-topic only.

If using a bot to update static lists, I would suggest:
 * Make a rule that anything on a by-topic PNA page needs to be tagged with cleanup-date, and needs to be in one of the categories specifically enumerated for that section (or a subcategory). (These can be automatically checked by the bot.)
 * If an article is tagged for cleanup, but is not in any category, to put it on the right page, simply add it to the category it should have been in anyway. (The bot will need to make a list of "leftover" articles which are not in any section's enumerated categories.)
 * WP:PNA will definitely need to be purged of items not currently tagged cleanup-date.
 * An initial seed list for PNA sections will need to be created.

I was also noticing the growing number of articles tagged, and thinking that a similar per-topic classification would be a good idea. Category:Pages needing expert attention is also growing alarmingly large, and obviously it would help a lot if "experts" were actually able to find articles in their field.

If using a bot to update static lists, the bot could create a "attention", "stub", "expand", and "expert" sections for each topic, using the same category lists (or the existing topical stub categories). PNA sections could be transcluded into appropriate Wikiproject pages, so there's a single distribution point for updates. -- Beland 01:42, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Bots? Categories? Lists? Why choose?
Wow! Glad to have you aboard, Beland.

I think what I was proposing is a mix of several of your ideas listed there. Elements that have come out of discussions include:


 * Deprecating cleanup and cleanup-date for a tag.
 * Pearle, as before, could migrate and  to the new format by adding the appropriate date, which would (as now) automagically add it to the appropriate date category.
 * Gnome bot is intended as the janitor bot. It's not yet coded to do topic-specific sorting (a big task, requiring all sorts of keyword-based searches), but it can handle easy things like wikify, Sections, and stub. It was previously replacing cleanup with these, but this has caused sufficient complaint that we'll probably recode it to add those tags.
 * If anyone has ideas on how to automate topic-specific sorting, I would love to hear them. I'd previously considered it too massive to tackle, but the more stuff that gets autosorted, the less has to be sorted by eyeball -- and the volume of articles to be sorted is the #1 objection to WikiProject Cleanup sorting. In other words, we need a topic sorter bot.
 * I originally wanted to use cleanup solely as a sorting queue, but a bunch of complainers (including you) seem to think it ought to be kept as a grab-bag for unclassifiable stuff. That's ok as long as we also make sure everything that can be classified is.
 * PNA as a solely human-maintained list is clunky. Let's generate matching categories as well. This shouldn't be too difficult -- AfD does this all the time and runs like clockwork. Again, I have doubts on whether bots can do all the necessary sorting, so a list of articles would have to be generated.
 * expand and expert should be subsidiaries of PNA, and thus automagically targeted for sorting by bot or human.
 * Transcluding PNA:topic to Wikiproject topic is a vital and urgent priority, be it done by a list and bot or a category.
 * Should PNA's non-cleanup tags be purged or added to the cleanup pot?

Thanks for all your thoughts! Alba 21:46, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm concerned that the direction here is toward a much higher overhead implementation than is desirable or necessary. Use of list pages like now exist under PNA (Pages needing attention/Agriculture, etc) are overly cumbersome to use because they require updates to both article and the list page, and this occurs at both entry-time and at removal-time.

Instead, I think this process should take full advantage of the Category mechanism because this reduces the amount of separate edits needed to just one for entry and one for removal. I'm not sure how to handle the needs areas (like wikify, etc), but at least for topics this should use a pure-category mechanism invoked by a tag. With dates as well, the tag could look something like:

which, besides generating a box on the article, would enter it into appropriate categories as well:

The single edit inserting or removing a simple tag is suitable for human editing. If at some point an ambitious bot programmer could determine an appropriate topic for some articles (say from topical categories that are already referenced by the article), then such a bot could automatically convert tags into the topical-category form. -R. S. Shaw 20:42, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I can see the argument for your system, but problems exist:
 * Is your multi-switch cleanup tag obvious for people to use? I don't find the Babel tag system, which runs on similar lines, easy to use at all.
 * How will people know what tags to use? WP:CR is very bulky right now.
 * What about multiple problems and multiple relevant categories?

What I'm afraid of is a tag like this:



-- for, say, a textdump of building descriptions for al-Azhar University. Could Joe User figure out how to write that? I think not.

Tags-only would be great if a bot were doing everything, but I'm skeptical that a bot can handle everything. My way is more work but a less steep learning curve -- as with AfD, it's possible to explain in short declarative sentences. Turns, roundabouts, etc. Alba 23:05, 5 April 2006 (UTC)