A Marker set by a person, perhaps even the original author to point out places where edits would may be of benefit, but immediate action is not taken for one or more of the following reasons:
Does not understand the original intent or relationship to topic
Subtle code that appears to be wrong
Insufficient grasp of the discussion domain to be able to make a final judgement
Would prefer a more democratic approach or second opinion be applied to decisions
"Signed" content that needs fixing by the original author to avoid mis-attributing.
Hinter feels uncomfortable making the changes themselves for some other reason
Wishes to document that change is needed, perhaps for self to later clean when has more time, in a cleaning mood, or at a computer with more editing tools.
A To Do marker can be seen as a special case.
Um, we have lots of examples of Wiki pages that have had plenty of refactoring applied to them. Sometimes a skilled Wiki Master will extract a very large portion of the page and place it in its own, new, page. The original page then gets a notation reading something like, "Discussion of Foo-Bar moved to Foo Bar." The resultant pages (both source and newly created) end up being the better for it.
This is a very cool convention. I am not a skilled Wiki Master, so I don't even attempt such editing and refactoring.
Edit Hint: This page could do with simplifying, but I am unclear as to how to retain all the original authors' ideas.
Edit Hint is in a way the super-tag or default of the following specialized refactoring tags:
...
Seems, that this tag is overused, there are >200 Back Links. Or maybe there are too few Wiki Gnomes looking for work here. Or maybe there are more Meta Wiki Gnomes than Wiki Gnomes.
It is reflected by an honest admission that the one making the hint has either insufficient knowledge to correct the flaw, or lacks the time and the interest in making the correction. It is overused (presently over 250 pages contain this hint) and seldom acted upon, leading one to question its value, versus discussion about what is wrong and what would make it right. I would rather make an attempt at correction than use this tag which would suggest that someone else should do it. -- Donald Noyes
I've seen a fair amount of them eventually addressed. Not all, but many. The alternatives have plenty of pitfalls.
count has nearly doubled the former 200, it is nearly 400 ( on 2014 02 12 ), which to me does not seem to mean "eventually addressed".
This does not count the other pages involved from the list above that mean "attention please" and "address this"
What I have done is to have a look at the list and see if there were any which I had been involved in. I found one which I had previously fixed and cleaned it up. -- John Fletcher
See also: Todo Comments, Fixme Comment
See original on c2.com 