[Wikipedia-l] Christmas presents, or: MediaWiki, reloaded

Sun Dec 11 20:18:09 UTC 2005

Ho-ho-ho,

yes, it's a little early, but the presents I bring are not completely
finished either.

My test site [1] now features three features that will, hopefully, ease
some of the pains of reliability and every-day work at wikipedia.

The first one you know, the validation feature, in its current
incarnation. It has already been pre-field-tested by some people from
the German wikipedia.

The other one we talked about, the "stable version". This is a currently
a very basic implementation, and will be overhauled by me to add some
usability and reduce confusion (e.g., clicking "edit" on the stable
version page).

The third one I talked about, but noone saw it yet, so here it is: Task
management! (you gonna love this!)

First, I made some screenshots [2] for the people who don't have time to
read boring text or try it live :-)
Still with me? Great! The task management feature is intended to replace
both the category-and-template based tags like "cleanup" or "wikify",
and the very-long-page-based things like AfD. (Please, don't start yet
another thread about keep/turn off AfD here!)
If you go try it out, better get a user account; so much more fun (can't
change tasks as an anon).

Executive summary:
* Article sidebar
** All open tasks for a page will be displayed in the sidebar of the article
* New tab "Tasks"
** Create new tasks, look at and modify existing tasks for that page
** "Create" ("please create a blank page for a poor anon") and "Write"
("Requested articles") tasks available for non-existing articles
** Tasks can be closed ("closed" or "won't fix")
** You can assign yourself a task; it will be marked as such, so no more
double effort and edit conflict :-)
** Every task, for every page, can have its own discussion page, in a
"Task:" namespace. On these pages, there's backlink and info for the task
* New "Special:Tasks" page
** List your own assignments (so you won't forget them :-)
** Search for (open) tasks

After a long, *long* weekend with little, *little* sleep, resulting in
more than 1000 lines of code for this feature alone, I hereby declare it
"running" :-)

Once I'm rested again, I'll look into additional functions:
* Search for tasks concerning pages in certain categories (yes, that
will include "parent" categories, I hope!)
* Auto assignment: You can sign up for "wikification duty"; a "wikify"
task will be assigned to you, and once you did it, as a reward, you'll
get the next one :-)

Emerging into coma right about ... now! :-)

Magnus

[1] http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php
[2] http://www.magnusmanske.de/tasks/