My idea for the Wikimedia Hackathon is to develop a MediaWiki extension for on-wiki working groups, known on the English Wikipedia and some other wikis as "WikiProjects."

This idea arises in the context of my work with WikiProject X, which researched WikiProjects on the English Wikipedia. One of the findings of our research is that since WikiProjects are just pages, they take a lot of maintenance to keep up-to-date. They regularly become out-of-date and not useful to the community.

WikiProject X is currently devising a WikiProject template that uses automated worklists. This is our current prototype: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Technology though the worklists are not ready yet (bot is still under development).

My idea is for an extension that handles the WikiProject page creation automatically. Workflow is something like this:

1. There is a designated namespace: "WikiProject:" or "Workgroup:" or something.
2. You go to a special page to create a new group. You specify the name of the group, description of the group, and you come up with the definition of the group's scope (e.g. "All pages of Category:Something_or_other, up to 5 subcategories.") Optional: On the talk page of each affected page (ns n+1), or somewhere else, there would be a notice of some kind saying that the page in question is tagged by the workgroup. Ideally something less obtrusive than the current WikiProject banner ;)
3. You end up with an automatically rendered page with automatically run reports. The reports would include, among other things, a cross-section of pages tagged by that group and a pre-defined list of maintenance categories. The reports would help direct editing activity.
4. Group membership function: you press a button and end up on a list. You get notifications for new discussions and perhaps other things.

Obviously we can only do so much in a weekend, but I hope the project at least gets started.

The value proposition of this project is that helps organize work, especially for larger wikis where there is so much to keep track of. It has potential for introducing new editors to Wikimedia projects; rather than throwing them in the deep end, give them an opportunity to work with a smaller group of people.

This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey

This proposal received 2 support votes, and was ranked #97 out of 107 proposals. See also: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech_project_ideas#WikiProject_Wizard