Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Use PetScan to find how long a template has been in an article

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Use PetScan to find how long a template has been in an article

NoN This feature is not technically feasible

  • Problem: There are a lot of articles with problems. These problems are often marked with a template, and sometimes the articles get fixed quite soon. There are also articles that have been marked for many years. Currently, it is possible to use PetScan to find out which articles have a certain template (example). What is not possible is to find out is which one of those articles was the first one to get the template.
  • Who would benefit: Active editors
  • Proposed solution: PetScan, A way to find the date a template was added.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Jylöstalo (talk) 17:38, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • On en.WP we have a bot which adds the date so that the page can be categorized. Do other wikis not also have that? --Izno (talk) 19:16, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Specifically: the current en.WP bot does edits like this to add date parameters to templates, and automates the creation of categories, and various other aspects of this workflow (see "TagDater" here for technical details). @Izno: the majority of communities do not have any (or enough) local bot-wranglers and lua/js-developers whom are needed to support the creation (or localization and customization) and maintenance of partially-automated workflows like this.
    • In the long-term, we need either global templates + global bots, and/or some sort of modular-creation-system for partially-automated workflows that is easy-to-use and localize, or something similar.
    • In the short-term, an idea like this one might(?) work to help those communities. However, I think it is essentially requesting the creation of the "Blame" tool, which is immensely complicated but widely desired - see phab:T2639 for links to the many previous discussions (including 3 past Wishlists) and research. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:47, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Archived

Jylöstalo, unfortunately our team wouldn't be able to work on this feature as adding template addition time tracking to MediaWiki is a fairly complex task that doesn't look good in cost/benefit analysis, while doing that in PetScan alone would require maintaining a huge database for that purpose only. Thanks for participating in our survey. MaxSem (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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