Wikipedia talk:Pages needing attention/Archive 2

Someone should write a paragraph guideline on removal of items
Would it not be a good idea to have a paragraph explaining the procedure for removing pages from this list?

Suggested paragraphs to be inserted at the beginning of the article might be the following.


 * If you check an article on this list and you are sure that edits have fixed the page to be about Wikipedia average in regard to defects, then remove that article from this page. Be sure to note the removal in your edit summary.


 * If you think that an article has been fixed to be Wikipedia average but you are NOT sure, then make a comment underneath the article's listing on this page so that someone else can doublecheck your perception that the article is Wikipedia average.

Or something like that. I will let this comment sit here for a few weeks, and if there is no opposition, then I will insert a couple of paragraphs like the above. Rednblu 21:15, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I was wondering about that myself. Don't wait, act now! -- Cyan 18:45, 9 Sep 2003 (EDT)

I don't find any feasible suggestions anywhere on what to do after one as fixed an article. The only valuable suggestion is to make sure to mention it in the page histories of both the (hopefully) no longer contentious article and the "Pages needing attention" page. Okay?  16:29, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * I think that sounds fine. :) Angela. 00:14, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

NPOV disputes
The header at the top of the page says that NPOV disputes should not be listed here. That doesn't make sense to me. Where should NPOV disputes be listed? The NPOV dispute page does not seem to be the correct one; there is nothing there that is analogous to this page. Conversely, pages needing attention does in fact identify many pages that need attention because of POV errors.


 * I think the reason is that the NPOV dispute header points to the dispute page, and one can hit "what links here" on that page to find the disputed pages (if backlinks were enabled, which they aren't right now). As pages needing attention don't get a boilerplate header, there is no backlink to follow, so they have to be explicitly listed here. -- Finlay McWalter 03:00, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Categories
Wouldn't this meta page work better if things were in catagories rather than in alphabetical order? That way "experts" could more efficiently find articles they can assist with. Kingturtle 05:04, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * That sounds like a good idea. Feel free to go ahead and implement it :-D --bdesham 21:45, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

How to mirror the popularity at VfD
In this mailing list post Eclecticology asks This line of inquiry begs the question, "How do we make 'Articles needing attention' more functional?"

Perhaps we need to give it whatever it is that makes VfD so popular. Articles placed at VfD are regularly improved. Over half of the pages listed there are not deleted because they are viewed by and discussed by a large number of people and a lot of work goes into them over the five days in which a page is listed. Perhaps part of the appeal is the time limit. You know you have to improve an article within five days or it will be gone. Another contributory factor may be that you know if you work on a VfD'd article, a lot of people are going to see the results of your labours. The work you put into it will be discussed at VfD and hopefully you will be rewarded by having the page removed from VfD. The excitement of the time limit and rewarding aspects of working on a VfD'd article need to be somehow applied to the pages needing attention if this page is to made a success. So, any ideas on how to do that? How do we make this page more appealing and attract the attention of the VfD'ers? Other than threatening to delete everything listed here in five days time? Angela 00:59, Nov 7, 2003 (UTC)


 * Another problem is that a lot of the pages being listed HERE aren't simple fixes. A fair number of the pages listed here seem from the comments left to require significant work; and many are not stubs, but rather longer articles that are possibly inaccurate, need fact checking, need rewriting.  It's a fair amount of effort.  While a lot of the stuff listed at VfD are cases where the existing content can be more-or-less junked.


 * Also, I suspect the VfD listing encourages people to be bolder. With 'fix or delete' hanging over peoples' heads, they are more likely to take chances such as deleting inaccurate info.  Otherwise, I find a lot of people are cautious making large-scale changes to existing articles that involve removing stuff. --Morven 01:14, 7 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * Exactly -- human beings are deadline oriented. Ask any journalist, tax payer, student, politician, lawyer, union worker.. ok, maybe not union worker :). With a deadline looming, people get into gear.  It's not clear this page can mirror the popularity, because VfD is "the last call" and Pages Needing Attention will always be yet-another-page-for-open-ended-discussion, like the edit war page, NPOV page, or cleanup.  Fuzheado 02:47, 7 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * I also forgot to mention, the reason VfD gets more visibility is because there is a boilerplate text put on the top of each article listed. That gets higlighted in the Watchlists of folks, and they mobilize to action.  Listing pages on Pages Needing Attention doesn't set off the same alerts/alarms. Fuzheado 02:59, 7 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * I think VfD acts a lot like Pages needing attention &mdash; it just puts more of a fire under people's butt. Almost anything worth salvaging gets fixed before it's deleted.  If nobody cares enough to fix something, then it gets deleted.  Deletion is a valuable tool, I think.  This all being said, I'm all in favor of making Pages needing attention more popular.  However, I never add an article to VfD if I think it can be fixed.  If not by me, then I leave a comment on the talk page, add it to "Pages needing attention", if I want to be inflammatory, I might even add an NPOV banner.  In other words, I suspect "Pages needing attention" (which is alsorivaled by several other pages) gets less attention because people usually fix stuff on their own.  Daniel Quinlan 03:26, Nov 7, 2003 (UTC)

Some steps: JamesDay 08:47, 8 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * Stop using the time-intensive VfD process and use less time-consuming cleanup or pages needing attention whenever possible, so people get more time to work on articles.
 * Make the articles as interesting as many of the articles on VfD. Finding interesting things is one reason I regularly read VfD.
 * Encourage people to do their homework before listing on VfD. Done the Google search yet to see if it's something you didn't recognise or a title which should be about something completely different, which you can write in 5 minutes? Is it a newbie needing welcoming and help finding a clue instead of VfD?
 * add random short pages and random pages with one editor to random pages options.
 * add page quality 0-9 checkboxes and random tagged as needing attention 0-9 choices. Delete pages needing attention.
 * add automatic deletion of pages at quality 0 for 6 months and list of pages at quality 0, oldest to newest. delete VfD.:)
 * add needs wikification and needs copyedit checkboxes.

As someone who has only recently discovered the joys of Pages needing attention, and who enjoyed giving a page what attention I could give it, I have to say that I think that the problem is really with the way VfD is used. That page, in my view, should be for pages that the lister deems irredeemable. The fact that half the listed pages are not deleted but improved indicates to me that they should have been put on pages needing attention to begin with.

Within Pages needing attention, there may be a need for two metacategories, Pages needing expert review and Pages needing editorial review. Equally, newcomers like myself should be encouraged to put articles on Peer review and old lags should equally be encouraged to go there more often and do the peer reviews requested. Bmills 17:17, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I wrote Vernon God Little, which is listed here and has a stub note on it. Now, I do not believe it is a stub but a short article on a novel that is worth noting. I've seen lots of similar single-novel pages (e.g.The Day of the Locust) I'd like to suggest that Vernon God Little be removed from this page and that the stub note be removed. In fact, if nobody objects, I may come back in a week or so and do it myself. Is this OK? Bmills 10:46, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * A short article is not necessarily a "stub". The stub note is to draw attention to it because it needs fixing, so if you feel it doesn't need fixing, I'd say it's ok to remove the stub note and delist it from this page. Angela.

Boilerplates
Why not create some more boilerplates, if they don't already exist, for "Peer-review requested (this article needs close checking to confirm details about ..."), "Cleanup needed (typo, grammar, and idiocy check)", "translation cleanup needed", and so forth.

Peer-review, knowledge-needed, and dispute (already exiss) boilerplates could go on the article page (so that someone looking for info will know that there's a problem or needs info, and exactly what the problem is), while cleanup boilerplates could go on the Talk page.

Having standard boilerplates would mean that people looking for something to do simply go to the page for that boilerplate and click on the "What links here" link to see what needs work. If it's something that covers the basics, then a peer isn't likely to look at it that closely. I mean, *I'm* not going to go look at the Computers 101 page, unless I see it linked somewhere. And if it needs some kind of technical work, hen there should be a boilerplate anyway, to warn people who might not otherwise know better.

I think the peer-attention boilerplates should also have a link to the Talk page, and the problems listed a the top of that page, so that non-peers will know what to be careful of, without having to wonder how to find out or exactly where to look.

Having a boilerplate will give notice to whatever peer is reading it that s/he should re-read it more carefully. Otherwise, you're trusting that they'll happen to read the problematical section, and that they'll notice that there's a problem.


 * I think that having a standard cleanup boilerplate would be a fantastic idea. I do a lot of "random page" surfing, and seeing a cleanup-notice at the top of a page would a) cause me to take a second look at the article, and b) let me know that the information in the article may or may not be completely reliable.  Joyous 04:14, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)

Time for this page to die
I'll claim a right to speak on this issue, as I was the original creator of the page, way back in the early days. This page was created when we really didn't have any method of bringing attention to a "less than ideal" page, except through making comments on RC. Also back in those days a single page was adequate as we only had a couple of thousand genuine articles anyway.

Unless someone can demonstrate a clear function that PNA performs which isn't handled elsewhere, I would question why this page still exists. Regards Manning 18:32, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Err, how else can we bring attention to less than ideal pages? --Shallot 23:11, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I also agree that PNA should go. Cleanup and PNA serve almost identical purposes. Johnleemk | Talk 19:33, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * PNA is useful for breaking up work according to categories, and often contains pages that need long-term care. Cleanup is good for minor, short-term work, but terrible in the long term because it has no memory.


 * To Manning: regarding whether you have a "right to speak" about this, you have no more right than anyone else. Pages belong to Wikipedia, not their creators.  --[[User:Eequor| &eta;  [[Image:Venus symbol (blue).gif|&#9792;]] [ &upsilon;&omega;&rho; ]]] 18:58, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Arrangement suggestion
Maybe things would go more smoothly if articles on this page were placed in chronological order, like in Cleanup and Votes for deletion, so people could more easily see the age of a request. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 19:35, Aug 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * Should each section be divided into subsections by month? That seems rather unwieldy.  --Eequor 22:31, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Howabout dumping the entire page into an archive every two months (i.e. Pages needing attention/JunJul2004)? Because frankly it is too long now to be useful -- one could spend days working on this and never put a dent into it, which is unfortunate and really makes the page an unpleasant page to visit, and a hopeless place to put articles. There are, lets be frank, always going to be hundreds of pages which need attention, but keeping ones from years ago up here is not likely to be useful. --Fastfission 22:15, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Articles in need of formatting
User:Guanabot has made some automated fixes recently that brought some formatting issues to my attention, most of which were due to some old automated-conversion imports back in February 2002. The articles in question are the "Communications in...", "Politics of...", "Geography of..." sort. I don't know how many of these there are, but the old versions all suffer from some poor formatting. If anyone could pitch in to help reformat these, that'd be splendid. For examples of how I think they should be formatted:, , ,. Most of these could use some additional wikification, i.e. links on km and m, headings stating what the article is about, more correct degree/min/sec on the geographical coordinates, etc. I've been following in the trail of Guanabot, to make these articles easier to find. -- Wapcaplet 19:12, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

P.S. - See also Transportation by country. -- Wapcaplet 19:28, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Not to mention updating with more recent data. -- User:Docu

I've continued to format and wikify these, finding more small things in need of improvement along the way. Currently I'm concentrating on the "Geography by..." articles. In those, "sq km" should become "km&sup2;" with a wikilink to square kilometre. "m" and "nm" should become wikilinks. There are probably a dozen other recurring phrases that could become wikilinks, but I haven't bothered with them. I've added Category:Geography by country to those I find without it. My changes haven't been completely consistent from article to article, but if you want to see what I'm doing, look at my contribs. Help on this would be greatly appreciated :-) -- Wapcaplet 02:07, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

BTW, for articles that need more basic wikification, there's a specific subpage of Cleanup (rather than PNA): Category:Articles that need to be wikified. --Joy &#91;shallot&#93;

Organization
I'm not sure how this page might be better ordered. Placing each section on a subpage so they can be monitored individually may help to divide the perceived load some. I've tried inserting hardrules to keep months separate, but that doesn't seem any better than the flat lists. Are there reasonable different ways the page could be organized? Does the following layout help any? -- 22:20, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[ removed for maintenance purposes ]

Untagged articles
Most pages on Pages needing attention are missing an   tag. In some cases this may be essentially vandalism, tags being carelessly removed; but some may have been fixed without removing the listing here. The listings should be reviewed anyway, both to check whether there are unneeded tags or whether tags should be replaced. -- 00:38, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Experiment
For an experimental reorganization similar to Requested articles, please see Pages_needing_attention/Void. Should this replace the current bulky page? -- 17:30, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Thumbs up. My previous comment, which was fairly incoherent, was due to stupidity. Please ignore it. EagleFalconn 20:01, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Help on Adding a Category
Hi, there. I meant to add a page to the category "Psychology" under the "Social sciences and humanities" section, but the heading is missing from the Pages_needing_attention/Social_Sciences_and_Philosophy page. I couldn't find any tutorial on how to create it. If this is analogous to VfD, I suppose the correct procedure would be:
 * Create Pages_needing_attention/Psychology
 * Create Pages_needing_attention/Social_Sciences_and_Philosophy/Psychology as a redirect to the above
 * Edit Pages_needing_attention/Social_Sciences_and_Philosophy and add

Can someone please confirm if this is right? Thank you very much. Vlad M V &#1645; talk 17:28, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Apollonia (city)
Does anyone speak and writte in German?, please help me translate this this! --Albanau 10:53, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Moved comment
Moved from Wikipedia talk:Pages needing attention/Social Sciences and Philosophy
 * I am not quite sure I fully understand the complex structure of this page. All I can see is that my recent addition on reception history has vanished somewhere. Obviously what I am writing now will be obsolete the moment I try again, but what else can I do? 
 * (Hopefully more recent upgrades will help prevent confusion. -- Beland 22:13, 16 April 2006 (UTC))

What's the difference between this and cleanup?
Can anyone tell me? Seems to me it would be better if the two pages were merged. Johnleemk | Talk 11:10, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * This is more for pages that have subtle and/or profound problems and need attention not of the cursory and quick kind that is generally understood by cleanup. --Joy &#91;shallot&#93;   11:40, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That said, I used to visit Cleanup, but don't anymore. It's just a huge garbage dump where people will report all the problems they're too lazy to fix themselves. Conversely, I don't put pages on Cleanup anymore, either. If I can fix it, I'll fix it, otherwise I'll put the problems I see on the talk page and leave it at that. But that's just me. JRM 12:04, 2004 Dec 25 (UTC)
 * Basically: a PnA might be put on Cleanup, but not the other way around. Cleanup is for pages needing gruntwork, mostly formatting, while PnA is for pages needing expert attention, mostly content. You don't put a page on PnA unless you're absolutely sure none of the other avenues of fixing a page is appropriate.


 * This may be changing over time, or different people may have different ideas, but it's my understanding that listings here need some (possibly small) amount of subject-specific expertise, whereas "cleanup" is not topic-specific. - Beland 03:18, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

So what's the difference between this and Category:Pages needing attention?
Why are people manually adding links to individual pages from here, when adding the template to a page will get it automatically listed in Category:Pages needing attention? I just removed several pages that had been listed here for well over a year because the people who cleaned them up didn't realize they were linked from this page. Tim Pierce 06:37, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Reform proposal
I agree with the previous comments that the differences between the various attention-requesting pages are very slight. Even though some people have clear ideas about what goes where, in practice there are some pages listed on Pages_needing_attention that clearly belong somewhere else, and probably vice versa.

Cleanup is currently undergoing a substantial revolution (see Wikipedia talk:Cleanup for details during the transition process). Instead of there being a central page where listings are added and then cross-referenced on talk pages and whatnot, the idea is to just use template tags that put articles (or more specifically, their talk pages) into special categories. Then, we can just point people who want to do work of a specific type to the corresponding category. Sorting by age can be automated with the use of a bot. This almost eliminates the need for maintenance on the central page, which is time better spent actually fixing articles. It also means that there is only one place where all the comments of interest to article-fixers are located - the article's talk page - instead of the talk page plus several special-purpose repositories floating in Wikipedia space.

One of the really nice features of Pages_needing_attention is that things are split up by topic area. This makes it easy for people with an interest in a particular topic to find articles they would enjoy working on. But it would be nice to divide things by topic for the purposes of remedial cleanup and expansion, too.

I would propose the following:


 * Create Template:cleanup-topic and Template:expansion-topic.


 * Tagging an article would say something like "This article needs cleanup by someone with expertise in the field of law." and would put the article in "Category:Articles on law in need of cleanup" which would itself be found in "Category:Wikipedia cleanup by topic".  And something similar for expansion.


 * Post instructions on this page telling people to use these tags instead of listing articles on Pages_needing_attention.


 * Disband Pages_needing_attention by moving all the comments posted here to talk pages and adding any appropriate cleanup, cleanup-topic, or expansion-topic tags. Some listings need , merge or split tags, or something else instead.  Some effort could be made in short-term advertising to help reclassify or Just Fix the listings.  Actually, some of the tagging and moving work might be automated using a bot, since the listings are rather well-structured.


 * Eventually, people should be directed to Wikipedia:Cleanup instead, which will have a clear links to Wikipedia:Cleanup by topic and Wikipedia:Requests for expansion and whatnot.

-- Beland 01:03, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Some changes definitely needed
OK, folks, this article is a great idea in principle, but it's not user-friendly.

The page I came from ("2000") says in the template thingy: "Please see its listing on Pages needing attention"

First point is that NO pages have listings on this article, so the template is overdue for rewording accordingly. So is the phrase in the article itself that says the same thing.

Second point is that nobody is likely to try all the possible categories unless the subject is obvious. I've looked in the area that includes Astronomy etc, since dates are dependent on astronomy. Some of the listings there seemed to lead to further subpages. Too much like hard work on an unreliable 56K dial-up.

Are there really so many "Pages needing attention" that they can't be listed alphanumerically with a brief dated explanation by the person who decided that the page needed attention? Explanations longer than about 10 words should have links to the article's Talk page where the promoter can explain in as many words as he or she likes. A much more direct way for people seeing the Attention template to see what it refers to and to check how much of the required attention has since been given. (I can't even see, despite twice looking throught the page history for "2000", how many months ago the template was applied.)

I can see the value in the division into topic areas for experts to tackle their specialties. But that doesn't help the person who has come from the page, may or may not be a specialist, and doesn't know which category it has been listed in.

I've read some of the earlier notes on this page. Very good ideas among them. But no help to me in this case nor to others in the same situation.

I guess I can go back to concentrate on my main WP "responsibility", where all 213 articles (and other pages) are in need of attention and there is therefore no need to stick inaccurate templates on any of them saying so.

Robin Patterson 02:15, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Integration with WikiProjects
I think this page would benefit by links providing easy ways to submit articles to the appropriate WikiProject. I'm going to add some of these, I'd be curious about any responses anyone has... JesseW 2 July 2005 08:06 (UTC)


 * Maybe "Pages Needing Attention" should be a Wikiproject - you know, getting rid of them by expanding them, formatting them correctly, copyediting ..or whatever it is they need :P --Nahallac Silverwinds July 2, 2005 13:51 (UTC)


 * I've experimentally semi-merged the "todo" list for the Sexuality WikiProject and the Sexuality listing here, and made it so that both listings show up on both pages. I think it would increase visibility of articles needing subject-specific attention if someone took the time to do this sort of link-up in more places.  It is a big project, though, because there are so many WikiProjects, and they don't always align neatly with the categorization scheme here.  Many of the WikiProjects are also inactive, and so those need to be marked as such and removed from the unification scheme.  Another consideration is whether to use "Template:Opentask" style, traditional central-listing style (like WP:PNA mostly does now), or both, or neither. -- Beland 03:16, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Articles which lack an tag
Many of the articles that were on this list have either been fixed, or need a different tag than the one suggested. It would be easier to go through the currently-listed articles and check them for proper tagging. -- Beland 23:02, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
 * (The list has since been deleted.) -- Beland 09:58, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Proposals so far
Between this talk page and User talk:Jekoko/Cleanup links, so far we have several proposals.


 * First PNA needs to be purged of things that are fixed and which don't actually require subject-specific attention. Why don't we write the last time a given category was purged right under the header? -- Beland 03:57, 8 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Above, you can see my proposal to disband PNA entirely in favor of Cleanup and Requests for expansion, but with new cleanup-topic and expansion-topic tags. Then there's this matter of integration with WikiProjects.  I think the best thing to do is to re-organize PNA to align with WikiProject boundaries, with additional topics filling in the gaps.  We can keep the central listings, because people will complain if we don't.  Each category should be transcluded both onto PNA and the associated WikiProject (or noticeboard).  This will take a long time.  We can also create tags that say "This TOPIC HERE article needs cleanup." or "This TOPIC HERE article needs expansion."  These tags should actually point to the central listings, and the central listings should have a link to the associated tag category (in case there are any articles that are tagged but not listed).  As long as the number of articles listed under any one topic is small, perhaps the task of checking through to see what's been fixed recently might be an acceptable cost.  These listings will probably change slowly, anyway, and will hopefully be watched by a dedicated group of content experts. -- Beland 03:57, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Should this page be re-named "Pages needing subject-specific attention" or something that more clearly expresses its mission? -- Beland 03:58, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Attention template vs. Expert template
Greetings. I understood PNA to mean pages that were seriously in need of cleanup, meaning they are unreadable in their current form. Now I see that some people are using PNA to mark pages needing attention from an expert. This is in direct contradition to the current template (Template:Attention), which reads: There is a separate pages needing expert attention template (Template:Expert).  This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. Please help recruit one, or [ improve this page yourself] if you can.

Please use the appropriate template. --Reinyday, 9 August 2005


 * These two tags overlappingly superfluous. It says in the guidelines that PNA is for pages needing an expert, therby needing the expert tag.  But later is says to add the attention tag as well.  You'd never get one tag without the other.  It seems PNA and Expert needs to be separated or merged.  Telso 09:53, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Intuitively, {attention} sounds just like {cleanup}, only having more serious/pressing problems. Especially since we have a separate tag for 'expert help needed', it seems like the instructions for {attention} should change to reflect their intuitive use. 24.17.48.241 19:24, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Silly sorting system
All these pages are sorted by the page type, not the problem type. For example, I listed Speakers' Corner because I needed information on a protest there about the war in Iraq. More importantly, the confusion was due to misinterpretation of the wording, written most likely by an Englishman. It would make much more sense to sort by problem type, in this case lack of knowledge of assumedly British English writing. Also, agree that categories are too numerous and too vague or too specific; many categories should be merged and then broadened as there can't be that many categories needed. The best category I could use was National Parks, which doesn't help at all. Also, specific expert tags could be used to track additions more easily (e.g. { {expert-mathematics} } instead of just { {expert} }). All these changes would make this page much easier to use. Telso 09:53, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

cleanup cleanup
Is it just me who finds this ironic, or will it be universal? the cleanup page needs cleaning up. very good that specific subjects have been listed at the bottom, but will someone please alphabetise them? and perhaps get their priorities in line? some people in society my hold comic books in higher esteem than chemistry, but i for one do not. especially in an encyclopaedia. Comments? mastodon 21:13, 4 November 2005 (UTC)