It is not clear where the template should be used or not. At present it is used practically exclusively for USA counties and Indian districts and seems to have been posted automatically. Some of the articles which have been taggen are completely lacking historic information but others have some phrases or paragraphs briefly explaining the history of the county or district. This raises the question: what data are absolutely required so that their lack justifies tagging the article?
There are numerous other similar articles which are not tagged. Articles on the districts of Lithuania or Slovakia, the oblasts of Russia, the departments of France and the administrative units of Italy or Germany which are no better or no worse than the articles on India or the United States are not tagged. The tags are used only for counties but not for other units.
If we are talking about genealogical value, the main interest is on the locality: village, town, city - which is more important than the city. Why is the tag not used at all for cities - it can hardly be assumed that all the articles on settlements have adequate historical data.
Maybe I am wrong, but I am looking at Wikia as a site for users, who are reading and trying to get information on subjects which are of interest to them. The structure of the site should be such that it does not confuse users. Finding a warning notice on some articles and no notice on many other articles with similar contents, creates the impression that the site is inconsistent.
There are over 3000 articles which are - correctly or not - tagged for insufficient historic information. They have been tagged for a long time - nobody has taken any corrective measure. This raises the problem of the utility of the maintenance tags. In principle they should indicate the volunteer contributors that some action is required. At present they show that nobody is looking at them.
If you have a building or a machine and have a list of items which require maintenance, but nobody is maintaining it, so that the list continues to grow, the result is that the building or machine deteriorates. What should be discussed is the maintenance of the system is carried out. The tags should concentrate whatever can be reasonably done. Otherwise, the tags have no positive effect. Afil 18:23, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
- Most of them were indeed added automatically, as part of the User:Phlox bot work that produced most of the county and district pages (and the "talk about" pages that we discussed more recently). You are probably not correct to say that nobody has done anything about them, but maybe you have in fact examined the history of every such page to see that nobody has added any more genealogical detail. I do not agree that the templates "show that nobody is looking at them". I agree that thousands of other articles could do with the addition of that template, and you're welcome to add it routinely. Pages (unlike working machinery) are not deteriorating by having nothing done to them. The presence of the template slightly increases the chance that somebody will improve the page. The site certainly needs lots more work done on it. We have had only about a thousand registered contributors to the site, and we want millions more. We are progressing slowly. A site that is in development will always show some inconsistencies, each of which can be taken as an invitation to improve the parts that are not so good. (The word "maintenance" is probably not the best word for our list of things that deserve improvement, but as we copied it from Wikipedia we may as well stick with it. Most readers don't even encounter the word; they just see things that need to be improved.) -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:22, January 3, 2012 (UTC)