Last modified: 2013-02-06 14:55:26 UTC
I would like to request a new extension to handle the workflow for [[en:Wikipedia:Peer review]]. Since 2007, this system has relied on a bot that I operate that fetches the lists of pages in various categories and then re-uploads those lists to the wiki, once an hour. The lists are then formatted by templates to make the pages that users view when working on peer reviews. I have typed up a full description of the current system at [[en:Wikipedia:Peer_review/Automation]]. The Good Articles system uses the same bot, and so the system would need to be flexible enough to handle that. A Mediawiki extension would be able to achieve the same effect without requiring the bot any longer. I would very much like to retire this bot task, which was originally intended to be temporary until a better solution could be found. There are many ways to achieve this request, and I don't want to tie it to any specific method. Some options include: (1) simply adding a new parserfunction that produces the lists the bot currently produces; (2) adding an entirely new extension to generate these lists; or (3) completely replacing the Peer review page with a page generated by the extension, which could also help with page size problems. The third option, if taken far enough, could also be used for workflows like the Articles for Deletion process - but that would make it a far larger task than the first two options.
Parhaps an extension which provided something like this? <CategoryIteration category="Arts peer reviews" type="pages" max="100"> {{CF/Arts peer reviews| {{#PAGENAME}} | {{#NS}} |{{#TIMESTAMP}} }} </CategoryIteration>
That would work perfectly as a drop-in replacement to get the same output as the bot's lists. One concern I have is with caching. If a new page is added to the category, I am not sure how to get the extension to know that the page has to be re-parsed. One the page generated by the extension is marked as dirty, the pages that transclude the page generated by the extension should be able use the usual templatelinks system.
