Supporting Editors' "Desire Lines" / Volunteer Toolkit

Figuring out where people are walking offline is tricky, but not necessarily hard. Many offline tools have been legitimized:

  • Google scholar, google news, and google books are linked right off of every AFD. Editors are constantly looking for sources.
  • Link-checks and activity patterns are linked right off every featured article nomination. Editors are checking for technical issues, and also trying to understand who is contributing.

So even without knowing traffic patterns, the fact that they're so prominent gives us a good hint as to the "desire path".

But there are a ton of tools people have already made: Templates! A quick look at those will show you the kinds of tools people need.

  • Citation templates are probably among the most used templates.
  • So are infoboxes.
  • Quality assessment templates.
  • Various "problem" tags are up there too.

It's not hard to see exactly what the community is trying to do, but has a hard time doing with the tools they have.

Randomran23:50, 27 November 2009