It would be neat to be able to associate certain regular expression matches in a title, e.g.

"^Talk.*/Deletion$" (matches Talk:<anything>/Deletion)

with certain templates, e.g. [[Template:Deletion]].

When I create a new page that matches the regex, say, [[Talk:Pompeii/Deletion]], the template would automatically be loaded into the usually empty edit box. It could contain things like

== Deletion discussion ==

== Alternatives ==

[[Category:Deletion]]

Please read the [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]] before participating in this discussion.

[[Category:Deletion]] could then be used with Magnus' scheme to get a list of all pages with ongoing deletion discussions. Similarly

"^Talk.*/Peer_review$"

could be associated with [[Template:Peer review]], which could look like this:

== Are the facts in the article correct? ==

[[Category:Fact review (yellow)]]

== Is the article well written? ==

[[Category:Writing review (yellow)]]

== Is the copyright situation clear? ==

[[Category:Copyright review (yellow)]]

== Is the article sufficiently illustrated? ==

[[Category:Illustrations review (yellow)]]

== Overall result ==

[[Category:Overall review (yellow)]]

Now, when I create [[Talk:Pompeii/Peer review]], I could add comments in each of these sections: The facts are OK, the copyright is unclear etc. The category tags in each section would reflect the current review level:

yellow: status unclear red: status negative green: status positive

Using the category feature I would then be able to obtain lists of all articles with factual problems, unclear copyright situation etc. Articles in [[Category:Overall review (green)]] could be moved to [[Wikipedia:Featured articles]].

Instead of the category system we could also use my template<->metadata idea:

{{ Peer review Facts => yellow Writing => yellow Copyright => yellow Illustrations => yellow Overall => yellow }}

To avoid having to manually create /Deletion and /Peer review pages, all we need is a little extra code that optionally adds a few links to useful subpages to each talk page:

Talk:Pompeii From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(some CSS) * '''[[Talk:Pompeii/Deletion|Vote for deleting this page]]''' * '''[[Talk:Pompeii/Peer review|Peer review process]]''' (end CSS)

Bam, you have - a solution to the VfD nightmare - a flexible, consensus-based quality control mechanism.

For the quality control part, being able to easily link to a flagged revision of an article would be a bonus, e.g. [[Pompeii+]] links to the version of Pompeii which has been previously marked "stable" by a sysop.

This does not address the details of the peer review process (e.g. what to do when an article changes substantially), but I believe these can all be worked out within the described framework (e.g. set overall review status back to yellow).

If we want to pursue this course, I suggest getting the category system in working order first (it seems to break every couple of days). The template<->regex association is fairly trivial, making it easy to internationalize without requiring changes to all 50 language files may be more difficult. The automatic subpage links are also trivial.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik