Wikipedia:Workflow improvements

This idea is in the brainstorming stage. Feel free to add new ideas; improve, clarify and classify the ideas already here; and discuss the merits of these ideas on the talk page.

Wikitext forms are awful! If I have to fill out another form that has {{subst:void}} or HTML comments everywhere, I'm going to get extremely irritated.

Let's replace wikitext forms with real forms. WP:RFPP is an example of this. You used to have to fill out this form, but now you can fill out this form.

There are multiple ways to proceed. We could go individually, process by process, making custom scripts for each. We could also try to come up with a way to let people specify a form in JSON, so that creating and editing forms would be easier. (Yes, this has been done before: for example, mw:Extension:FormWizard. But that's sort of stalled.)

We could go even further with the JSON idea: once you've specified a form, there should magically be a script that lets you review requests; there should be an archiving bot; and there should be a tool that lets you search through requests. Right now, for each process, these four things (requesting, responding, archiving, searching) all need to be done from scratch. That's a big waste of time.

So let's talk about this! The talk page is open for business.