User:Tom Morris/Personal wishlist

Below are a list of things I wish we would change about Wikipedia policy and process. But I'm not a GodKing, so I'll just write them down.

Eliminate RfC/U

It's ineffective. In my experience, it makes drama worse rather than better. I've seen a number of situations where ArbCom may have been able to stop a situation turning out badly if they had stepped in and calmed people down. But ArbCom often seem unwilling to act without an RfC/U, which basically means a situation where someone is being hounded or attacked just gets dragged out for a month.

If someone is willing to change their behaviour and acknowledge faults, they probably won't need an RfC/U. If they aren't, then an RfC/U probably won't change their behaviour. And if that person is in the right, an RfC/U is just a month-long poop-throwing jamboree.

A way to mark issues as needing attention on the talk page

We (rightly, IMHO) tell users with conflicts of interest to not edit articles about themselves or their employer or anything where there is a substantial conflict of interest. Which is fine. But if they follow our advice of "post on the talk page", there's no guarantee anyone will pay any attention. We have {{edit protected}} and {{edit semi-protected}} for placing requests on talk pages. We should probably have a similar way to mark sections of talk pages that have edit requests that don't require that they be made through protection, but simply because a user has a COI or isn't confident to make the edit or some similar matter.

Multi-watchlists, expiring watchlist entries

It'd be useful if we could have multiple wachlists. Being able to separate out articles I care about from articles I'm keeping an eye on because of vandalism from noticeboards and similar meta pages would be handy.

It'd also be potentially useful to be able to put something on a watchlist for a short period then have it automatically drop from the watchlist after a specified amount of time.

There are certain pages that you care about a lot that you want to be notified about every change. Having them on a sort of super-watchlist would be handy.

Surface what friends/colleagues are working on and need help on

It'd be great if Wikipedia had the ability to see a list of articles that friends have worked on that need attention. There is only so much time in the day to help with things like copyediting, reference finding, digging out images and so on. It'd be great to be able to see new articles that friends have started, and articles they need help on, but in such a way as to not break the spirit of WP:CANVASSING. If it were in a Facebook/Twitter-style reverse chronological log, all the better.