This card tracks a proposal that's currently part of the Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
The Wishlist Survey voting phase lasts until Dec 14th. After the voting has concluded, the top proposals will form the backlog for the Community Tech team to investigate and address.
**Proposal**:
For a variety of reasons many of the special reports have become useless and some projects have been forced to create their own custom reports such as database reports or through means of the WMFLabs/Toolserver. I recommend a complete overhaul be done to the way these reports are generated that would allow some role within a user community (like Admin or template editor) to be able to modify the code that drives these special pages. Some functionality I think would be useful to do should include:
1. The ability to hide reports from the list of those displayed if they aren't relevant to the project
2. Add new reports under some type of custom section
3. Be able to modify the criteria that is used to generate the reports.
4. Have more flexibility to expand the length of a report even if that is to break it into 1000-2500 article chunks across multiple pages.
Of course this is just a short list and more detailed requirements and analysis of the problem would be needed. Some things have already been suggested here as minor changes to individual reports or other utility changes but what is really needed is a complete overhaul of the way the Mediawiki system creates and handles reports.
Reguyla (talk) 14:48, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Miscellaneous#Major_overhaul_to_Special_reports