Editing Battlestar Wiki:Think Tank/Red Link Policy

This is a proposal aimed at discussing official approaches to dealing with "red links". 

=== {{SUBPAGENAME}} ===

Given the recent discussion on [[User talk:Joe Beaudoin Jr.|my user page]] regarding the approaches to red links, I feel that we need to have a discussion on this small, yet important facet of Wiki existence. 

There are two major, yet opposite approaches to dealing with the "red link". 

=== Red Links foster growth ===

One school of thought is that red links help drive interest in creating the article(s) in question. The idea is that the user is given the opportunity to create the article through seeing the red link.

=== Red links are ineffective, and thus a more direct and guided approach is needed ===

The opposite school of thought is that red links are ineffective due to the following:

* The [[Special:Wantedpages]] page does not allow results to be filtered, thus ''all'' red links (from non-existent image links to user pages that haven't been created to general talk pages) are seen. New or non-technical users may be discouraged by the sheer amount of red link "overload" that they would be literally scared to contribute.
** As corollary to the above point, many pages that are [[BW:i18n|being translated into other languages]] that do not have their own dedicated language edition are also red linked. 
* The [[User:TaskBot|Task Bot]], which updates the [[Battlestar Wiki:Tasks|task list]] every 12 hours, does not recognize those pages listed in [[Special:Wantedpages]]. Furthermore, given the fact that the results are unfilterable, having the taskbot tackle the wanted pages is unwise.
* A refined approach, namely tagging pages with {{tl|requested}}, allows results to be filtered and permits the user to:
** View a finite selection of pages that need to be created via the [[BW:TASK|task list]].
** View an entire category of pages that have been requested, thus refining the results automatically, and allowing contributors to guide the development of the wiki, though not to the point of micro-management. 

[[Category:Think Tank proposals|{{SUBPAGENAME}}]]