Treatment For Declined Waymarks

[+drmellow]

Recently, I submitted a waymark that was declined. Rightfully so -- I had misinterpreted one of the category requirements. I got a nice email notifying me that the waymark was declined, with an explaination as to why. Now I have an archived waymark in my "My Waymarks" list that will never be appropriate for the category I originally created it in.

 

My first thought is that I'd like a way to delete the waymark completely instead of simply having it archived. I've seen discussion about deleting vs archiving, and I understand the general value of archiving instead of deleting. So I'm not going to ask for the option to delete the waymark, although in this case deleting the waymark would be a perfectly fine option.

 

Instead, I'd like to suggest that a new field be added to the waymark listing when the waymark has been declined. Something along the lines of "Reason Waymark was Declined" or "Note from Category Owner (or Reviewer)" or similar. This field would be populated with the comments that the reviewer made when declinging the waymark. If the waymark is eventually approved, this field would be cleared, but if the waymark is never approved, this field would serve as a reminder for why the waymark was declined. In my case, the notes I got in the email notifying me that the waymark was declined were nice comments that explained precisely why my waymark was inappropriate. Since my waymark will never be approved, it will be nice to know exactly why it was declined when I'm looking through my list a few months from now -- I'll be looking at my list of waymarks, notice this one has a line through it, and unless I remember why it was declined, I might attempt to re-submit somewhere down the line.

 

As a work-around, I've decided to use the "Private Message" field to hold that information to serve as a reminder for me. That's a good enough work-around, but something a bit more automated would be better.

 

The other suggestion I had deals with the actual message a waymarker gets when a waymark is declined. In my case, I don't know for certain who declined my waymark. The email said something like "Category Owner," so I assume that's correct, but I'm not sure if that was just boiler-plate text -- was it really the category owner, or might it have been any of the other officers in the category? Either way, it would be nice if the reviewer's username was included so the waymarker would know for certain. Again, in my case, it's not a big deal since I'm not going to be attempting to resubmit the waymark, but for cases where it is appropriate to modify and resubmit the waymark, it would be nice to know exactly who declined the waymark so a waymarker can work with that person while going through the process of cleaning up the waymark.

 

All told, I probably spent more time writing up this forum post than is warranted by this issue, but I figured I'd share my thoughts on the process anyway.

 

Edit: Oops -- I should have searched the forums before writing this post. This previous post pretty much says the same thing I did. Looks like TPTB are looking into addressing this. I'm looking forward to 2.0....

Edited September 21, 2006 by drmellow