Wikipedia:Peer review/Automation

Since 2007, the Peer Review process has relied on a bot to make lists of category contents. It would be ideal to replace the bot-dependent system with a Mediawiki extension. This would make it possible to generate Peer review, Peer review list, and Peer reviews by date without the need for any external bot process.

A similar system with the same bot is used for Good article reassessment and other Good articles processes. The same Mediawiki extension that handles Peer Review needs to be flexible enough to handle similar processes.

The request for an extenssion is Mediawiki Bugzilla request 42887.

Current workflow

 * 1) To open a peer review, a user creates a page such as Peer review/Connotations (Copland)/archive1 and puts a note on the article's talk page.
 * 2) The peer review page uses templates that categorize it into a category such as Category:Arts peer reviews and Category:Current peer reviews.
 * 3) A bot lists all the pages in  Category:Arts peer reviews  and creates User:AnomieBOT/C/Arts peer reviews. The contents of this page are template invocations, with one invocation per page in the category. The invocations use a formatting template that is named after the category. They look like:
 * 4) The page that the bot creates is transcluded onto Peer review and other pages, Template:CF/Arts peer reviews formats the output in the desired way.
 * 5) When the peer review is over, the peer review page for the article is edited so that the categories change
 * 6) When the bot updates its list the next time, the peer review page disappears from the main list
 * 1) When the bot updates its list the next time, the peer review page disappears from the main list

The bot's list is also used to create Peer review list which has the same basic list of peer reviews but is formatted differently (the main page transcludes the reviews, while the "list" page does not). Another page, Peer reviews by date, is made from Category:Current peer reviews.

Benefits of using a Mediawiki extension

 * Users would see the same workflow they already see; the change would only affect the underlying process used to generate the peer review lists.
 * Switching to a Mediawiki extension, instead of a bot, would give a much faster (likely, immediate) update of the Peer Review page when a new peer review is added or removed.
 * The change would remove the need for the bot, which runs on toolserver, to be active at all times. Currently, the system would break whenever the toolserver is unavailalble or the bot is turned off.

Costs of using a Mediawiki extension
The page history of the pages that the bot uploads would no longer be updated if the bot stops generating them. It is not clear that anyone uses that history, however.