Wiki Ed uses the dashboard to track the Visiting Scholars program, and when that 'course type' is used, it only tracks contributions to articles that are explicitly assigned.

It would be possible to create a general course type for P&E Dashboard that has this same behavior. It wouldn't let you remove / hide articles, but it would let you specify all the articles you do want to track.

Thanks for the info.

Well, that would be closer, but still nowhere near as useful as I had hoped. Ideally, the tool would track all edited articles, and the coordinator would be given the option to limit the list to articles relevant to the thematic week. An alternative would be to assign articles to a user directly from their contributions list (by, say, an additional button "Assign this article to this user"). Otherwise the tool wouldn't really simplify things much for the coordinator. The way it is now, he/she has to browse through the edit history of all subscribed users, check which articles are relevant and prepare a list. Which is simpler on-wiki than in the Dashboard (less clicks there).

Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like Thematic Weeks are far enough away from the use cases that it's been designed for that it would take a fair bit of work to make it line up with that concept. An 'assign this article to this user' button in a contribution list would probably be fairly straightforward. I'll think more on it.

Yeah, this button came to my mind when working on my group of biology students: we had an article list prepared, but they did not report which article they chose. So I'm monitoring their work to see who is working on which article, but assigning them by hand is a couple of clicks. This could definitely be simplified. Thanks for all the help - and hope you can come up with something.