On 6/25/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
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Magnus Manske wrote:
Once upon a time, a busy programmer hacked a little extension called "Tasks". It was supposed to help semi-automate recurring tasks, from deletion requests to anon page creation petitions. It can automatically generate a page for each task in a special namespace where said task can be discussed. Tasks can be listed by type (and by page category, if enabled), and are shown in the page header or sidebar, depending on the type.
I'll be honest -- it didn't look like it would help with this stuff at all. For instance, it didn't handle with any of the above things that were mentioned.
Not as it is now. But it would be the aforementioned "internal mechanism" to keep track of these things, e.g., "time since deletion request is up".
All it was was yet another set of manually-maintained pages that would be hard to deal with.
It would replace the current template-based deletion process with a tracking system (e.g., "status") and its own, seperate namespace for task-related discussion. One could view lists, e.g., "Last pages that got a deletion request", "Oldest deletion requests that are still open", etc. The comment made when closing the deletion request could be served on deleted pages, instead of the deletion log (or whatever we have there now).
We are using bugzilla instead of MediaWiki pages for a reason. The same reason would apply here, IMHO, and not only for deletion requests. One could ask "which pages in [[Category:Biology]] need cleanup", or wikification, creation, or (partial) rewrite.
Magnus