[Wikipedia-l] Request management

Thu Dec 8 16:27:49 UTC 2005

We have been using templates for various management tasks for quite some
time now. Cleanup, wikifikation, deletion, all done through templates
and, sometimes, categories.

While some of these work out OK, AfD seems to be a mess, and Articles
for Creation (for anons on en.wikipedia) seems to be heading that way.
Handling of these task-tags requires editing of pages, making the page
history grow and generally being a pain (what was that template name?
did it have parameters?).

I hereby suggest a mechanism for "request management". Each article
would have a "Request" (or "task") tab, and there would be a
Special:Requests page. Through these, requests of all kind could be
handeled (added, listed, removed). Each request would get its own
"Request:" page for discussion.

A request would consist of:
* Article name (automatically filled in)
* Request type (chosen from a list)
* Comment/reason/explanation text
* Status (from a list, similar to bugzilla; "open", "solved", "wontfix")
* Other automatically filled-in information (who requested it, time of
request)

Requests would be shown in the sidebar of the page (like "Requests:
cleanup, wikify"). Details would be shown of the Special:Request page
*for that article*. All requests, sorted and filtered, would be shown on
Special:Request (*not* for a specific page).

Optionally, a filter could be applied for the categories an article is
in. This would allow me too see all articles in "Biochemitry" that need
a cleanup, for example.

Quick, tell me what you think, while I'm in a coding mood ;-)

Magnus