Grants:IdeaLab/Tool support for worklists

Inspire campaign

Tool support for worklists

Bot or tool support for on-wiki worklists.

idea creator• Stuartyeates

developer• APerson

created on01:50, Friday, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

I want to support small workgroups who wish to create and work through small or medium sized worklists.

What is your solution?

The central idea is a semi-standardised worklist format for articles or categories to be worked on. This would probably be a standardised table format on-wiki using on standard wiki markup. A number of different tools could then be used to create, modify, mark-off or annotate individual items on those lists. Lists could also be hand-edited where necessary. Use cases include:

• a small group of editors want to work though a category (and subcats) and check and update particular information. One editor would use a category-oriented tool to create a table of the members of the cat (the tool would have some functionality for selecting appropriate sub cats) and a stub worklist config on a new page in the Wikipedia: namespace somewhere. The editor would then add the names of the other editors and other info to the worklist config. A second tool (probably a bot) would check periodically (based on the worklist config) whether any of the listed editors had edited any of the listed articles, where they had, the articles' entry on the list is struck through. If a team member finds an article that doesn't need updating, they strike it out manually. When all articles are struck off, a third tool (probably a bot) archives the list and awards each of the participating editors some en:WP:LOVE as credit for their work.
• an editor has a spreadsheet of childrens-book authors who have won an award over successive years. For each author there is a name, year and a couple of URLs of biographical sources. The editor uses a tool to create a table of authors from the spreadsheet. Some of the authors are red links. In this case both the article names and the urls to sources get crossed off as work progresses.
• a wikiproject wants to catch in-scope articles which have not been tagged with the wikiproject template. An editor runs a tool which applies the en:User:AlexNewArtBot rules for the wikiproject over all articles looking for articles which have fewer than three wikiprojects (and not the wikiproject in question) and aren't marked as disambiguation pages. The tool finds a lot of such articles so it only lists the first 500 articles. They are struck off as above. Periodically the tool is rerun until all the articles are either tagged with wikiprojects or as disambiguation pages.
• a editor running an en:Edit-a-thon builds a worklist of relevant pages to work on manually. After the event the editor uses a tool that adds all users who edited the articles on the worklist during the window to the participant list and crosses off all articles which were touched during the same timeframe. A tool thanks those uses for their participation (using vague words so as not to imply they were necessarily physically present).

The idea is that multiple tools could all use a standardised worklist format.

Project goals

Easier creation of ad-hoc temporary wiki workgroups based on a standardised worklist format and a modest set of tools. By doing everything on-wiki editors who wish to do any particular steps themselves can. What would be needed:

• Documentation of the standardised worklist format
• Documentation of how to create lists manually
• At least two list-creation tools
• A tool that strikes off articles when edited by members of the work group
• A tool that strikes off URLs when added to the listed article
• A tool that notices when every strike-off-able item has been struck off and thanks users and archives the list.
• A list of further wanted tools that might use the format.

Get involved

Participants

• Developer This sounds like a great idea, and I'd love to be able to help out with web development or bot development tasks. APerson (talk) 17:35, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

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