Proposal:Activity bot for strategy proposals, task forces

The status of this proposal is:
' Done'

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.

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Summary

Create a bot that will visualize some measure of activity for a set of pages (e.g. strategy proposals and task forces). This will enable people to see at a glance which pages are active and which pages might need work.

Proposal

For starters, focus on Task Forces and the following simple metric:

Number of participants (parsed from the "Members" box on the Task Force main page)
Number of edits (among all of a Task Force's pages, categorized appropriately) over the previous seven days

It will then generated a list sorted by activity. For example:

Strategy (12 members. 86 edits in the past week.)
Content Scope (4 members. 25 edits in the past week.)
Living People (6 members. 12 edits in the past week.)

Future versions could experiment with more advanced metrics and visualizations. Possibilities:

Include LiquidThreads statistics, such as number of posts, number of authors posting, etc. It would be helpful if there were a LiquidThreads API for this kind of information.
Backlinks. This would be more useful for proposals than for task forces. See Proposals by number of inbound links for an example.
Instead of listing the number of edits, show a color gradation (between yellow and green) based on activity.
Show the change in activity from the previous week (up arrow, down arrow, level arrow).

Motivation

The purpose of this proposal is to help activate volunteers. The community on strategy wiki has done a great job of categorizing proposals on this wiki, but there are no good ways to show which proposals have active work and discussion. Similarly, as task forces become more critical as a way to get stuff done on this wiki, it will be useful to show which task forces are actually active and working so that people can direct their energy accordingly.

Potential Costs

I expect a first rev of this bot could be written in less than a day by someone experienced with writing bots. It wouldn't require any special intervention on the backend, although it may require some special categories and more rigid structure on the Task Force pages.

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Activity bot for strategy proposals, task forces.

Tim Starling wrote an extension on April 20, 2010 that implements this proposal. Thanks, Tim! For now, see it working at Special:ActiveTaskForces.

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