User:N8wilson/Content timeliness

While the easiest content maintenance issues may get remedied entirely un-noticed thanks to WP:BOLD edits by seasoned contributors, others may evolve in the general direction of a resolution aided by the contributions of a variety of editors over a period of time. This second group of issues tends to be those that are larger, more complex, applicable to more niche topics, and sometimes just more vague. This group isn't exclusively these issues though. It's feasible within WP {{emdash}}and even designed so that{{emdash}} simple easy issues may be quickly addressed when one editor adds a tag, a second editor improves it, a third provides a resource, and a fourth implements a change to resolve the issue in the article.

WP has a wide array of templates (see partial listing below) which are intended to help editors find unresolved issues and inch them forward where feasible. However, choosing the most appropriate template and using it effectively both play a major role in the ability of that tool to help improve an outstanding issue with an article. In the most unfortunate cases of good faith, a real issue may get tagged with a somewhat related maintenance tag that lacks specificity creating a situation where subsequent editors neither feel confident removing it nor equipped to address the maintenance issue for years or even decades for less visited articles.

The working theory that started this endeavor (if I correctly recall) is that secondary tools that interact with maintenance templates - primarily maintenance tracking categories - may be underutilized in helping contributors locate pages where they are both interested and able to assist. To that end, I expect that some level of analysis of WP maintenance as it currently operates may reveal insights that could be exploited to develop improved recommendations to editors, smoother workflows, and thoughtful technical resources to improve overall maintenance activities. I guess it was a help WP help you kind of thing.

; What's the severity?

: Ranges from "minimal impact of content quality" to "inaccurate content and/or WP policy violation".

: Can be notated with reference to policies, guidelines, and supplemental editing recommendations.

; What's the exposure?

: Ranges from "unpublished draft" to "main page, lots of viewers, repeated across multiple articles"

: This may take care of itself. More exposed articles will likely be seen by more editors capable of applying a fix.

; What's the issue?

: Ranges from "I don't know but it feels like something's wrong here" (sometimes just "please update") to "this specific claim has this specific problem".

: Impacts time required to fix

; Where's it located?

: Ranges from "somewhere in this article or group of articles" to "this specific claim"

: WP:Bold edits are more helpful than edit requests which are more helpful than inline tags which are more helpful than section tags which are more helpful than annotated article tags which are more helpful than unannotated article tags.

; What's the fix?

: Ranges from "I have no idea" to "here's some resources that might help" to "here's the solution"

: Always helpful when associated templates provide guidance and examples for fixing the issues they highlight.

; How long has this issue been unaddressed?

: Ranges from "seconds" to "decades"

: Perhaps clues in maintainers as to the difficulty of addressing the issue, the exposure and relative importance of fixing that issue, or both. Issues remaining unaddressed for longer periods of time are may be more difficult to address for reasons from ambiguity over what the issue is to lack of solutions and everything in between. They may also be seen by much fewer editors capable of fixing them and probably by extension, much fewer visitors encountering the un-remedied content.

; How controversial is this issue?

: Ranges from "widely differing views over whether it even constitutes an issue that needs fixing" to "broad consensus on the need to fix and proposed solution"

: Impacts the speed of resolution. Perhaps leads to higher quality fix when more controversial.

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Other potential refs:

Wikipedia:Current event templates