On 3 July 2012 13:11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
I suppose there is some obscure section of OTRS that
does that already.
Not that even someone who has OTRS access could find the stovepipe.
OTRS could be set up to work in this way, as a tracking system for
reported problems, but it's not currently used for it. Likewise, we
could use Bugzilla. Neither of these would be a very *useful* tool for
it, though! ;-)
We have a surprising number of ways of tracking issues in articles. To
name all the ones I can think of in a few minutes...
1) Tags inside the article
2) Tags on the talkpage
3) Comments on the talkpage
4) Discussions on related pages
5) Central maintenance reports
6) Individual to-do lists
7) Project to-do lists
8) OTRS correspondence
9) Bugzilla
10) AFT comments
Some of these generate logs (ie categories or OTRS queues), some
don't. None of them talk to each other very well; it's quite possible
that a given article could have different problems flagged in
different places. Very few of them have a clear mechanism for marking
as resolved, and so can remain as open tasks long after the issue is
resolved - we've discussed the problem of "tag lag" before. All of
these make our to-do worklists unfriendly, disorienting, and somewhat
unpleasant to use.
It is possible to imagine a workflow management system which absorbed
several of these mechanisms, to provide a centralised list of all open
issues and manage the relationship between articles and problems.
("This page is [[John Smith]]. The following issues are currently open:
* the page is marked for cleanup;
* it needs a photograph;
* there is an ongoing RFC about the scope of the article on talk;
* there is a related move discussion at X;
* it is in the death anomalies report;
* 3 users have marked it for followup;
* it is on a cleanup list at WikiProject Biography;
* there is an OTRS ticket at Y;
* there are two unresolved AFT comments pending")
...but, the sheer scale of the number of articles and the relatively
limited number of users suggest that any such system would be fairly
ineffective. It's an awful lot of bureaucratic overhead, especially
for something that is fundamentally still a wiki and continually under
change!
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk