Wikipedia talk:Pages needing attention/Archive 2

message: 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 Wikipedia: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)
thread_title: NPOV disputes

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

message: 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.  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)
replies: text: Howabout dumping the entire page into an archive every two months (i.e. Wikipedia: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)
thread_title:  Arrangement suggestion 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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 "km²" 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)
thread_title:  Articles in need of formatting 

message: 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?  --η[ υωρ] 22:20, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Organization 

message: 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.  --η[ υωρ] 00:38, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untagged articles 

message: For an experimental reorganization similar to Wikipedia:Requested articles, please see Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Void.  Should this replace the current bulky page?  --η[ υωρ] 17:30, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thumbs up. My previous comment, which was fairly incoherent, was due to stupidity. Please ignore it. EagleFalconn 20:01, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Experiment 

message: 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 Wikipedia: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 Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Psychology
* Create Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Social_Sciences_and_Philosophy/Psychology as a redirect to the above
* Edit Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Social_Sciences_and_Philosophy and add 
Can someone please confirm if this is right? Thank you very much. VladMV ٭ talk 17:28, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help on Adding a Category 

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

message: 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? <KF>
::(Hopefully more recent upgrades will help prevent confusion. -- Beland 22:13, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved comment 

message: 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)
thread_title:  What's the difference between this and [[wikipedia:cleanup|cleanup]]? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  So what's the difference between this and [[:Category:Pages needing attention]]? 

message: 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.
Wikipedia: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)
thread_title:  Reform proposal 

message: 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)
thread_title: Some changes definitely needed

message: 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)
thread_title:  Integration with [[Wikipedia:WikiProject]]s 

message: 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)
replies: text: (The list has since been deleted.) -- Beland 09:58, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Articles which lack an <nowiki>{{attention}}</nowiki> tag

message: 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)
thread_title:  Proposals so far 

message: 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:
This article is in need of attention.
Please [ improve it] in any way you see fit.
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)
thread_title: Attention template vs. Expert template

message: 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)
thread_title: Silly sorting system

message: 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)
thread_title:  cleanup cleanup