Wikipedia:Workflow improvements
 | This idea is in the brainstorming stage. Feel free to add new ideas; improve, clarify and classify the ideas already here; and discuss the merits of these ideas on the talk page. |
Wikitext forms are awful! If I have to fill out another form that has {{subst:void}} or HTML comments everywhere, I'm going to get extremely irritated.
Let's replace wikitext forms with real forms. WP:RFPP is an example of this. You used to have to fill out this form, but now you can fill out this form.
There are multiple ways to proceed. We could go individually, process by process, making custom scripts for each. We could also try to come up with a way to let people specify a form in JSON, so that creating and editing forms would be easier. (Yes, this has been done before: for example, mw:Extension:FormWizard. But that's sort of stalled.)
We could go even further with the JSON idea: once you've specified a form, there should magically be a script that lets you review requests; there should be an archiving bot; and there should be a tool that lets you search through requests. Right now, for each process, these four things (requesting, responding, archiving, searching) all need to be done from scratch. That's a big waste of time.
So let's talk about this! The talk page is open for business.
Timeline
(Leaving out many previous attempts to do this, I'm sure...)
- meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Miscellaneous/Input Forms
- Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 37#Bold idea: the Generic Queue Toolkit - initial discussion, August 2021
Shared functionality
- Live preview.
- Automatically add signature where possible - and indicate this clearly in preview.
- Input validations.
- beforeunload handler: you shouldn't be able to accidentally navigate away from the form and lose any entered text.
- Gracefully handling failures: If the browser crashes, you should be able to retrieve the "lost" content from the browser localStorage. If the submission failed for an unexpected reason, again the form contents entered should be recoverable.
- ...
Potential venues
- WP:Edit requests
- WP:RFPP - JS request form
- WP:PERM - wikitext request form, search tool (broken)
- WP:XfD - request form in Twinkle (works, no need to mess with it)
- WP:RM/TR
- WP:DYK
- WP:BRFA - user-script request form
- WP:DRN - JS request form
- WP:ANI - automatically leave notices on user talk pages!
See also
- mw:Flow (RIP - because this was in the original spec somewhere)