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  • 21 Aug, 2019

  • By, Wikipedia

Help Talk:Maintenance Template Removal

'If the tagging editor failed to do so, or the discussion is dormant, and there is no other support for the template, it can be removed.'

'removing POV-related templates whose discussions have gone dormant is encouraged, as addressed in the bullet point immediately above'

This is a horrible principle. A discussion being dormant does not mean that there is consensus that the article is not POV. A discussion very often becomes dormant just because nobody bothers to edit the article. Sometimes roughly 50% of the comments agree with a position, sometimes even a majority agrees that 'something ought to be done about this' and yet nobody actually takes the time to do something - everybody just goes on with their other business and forgets about the issue. Why, a discussion can even be dormant because nobody was around to respond to the motivation on the talk page in the first place. The rule seems to be formulated with the assumption that all Wikipedia articles are constantly monitored by numerous alert and highly industrious editors with a keen interest in the topic. In fact, there are many articles that few editors are interested in or pay attention to, so years or even decades can pass before somebody even reads a talk page message. And Wikipedia editors are not paid, so they cannot be expected to be constantly alert and to proceed to solve every problem that has been highlighted. A lack of interest or activity doesn't mean that the problem is solved or that there is no problem. Anonymous44 (talk) 08:13, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]