Wikipedia:Task of the Day

Wikipedia:Wikiproject Five Images a Day redirects to a section here.

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Initial idea: Similar in rough format and arrangement to Wikipedia:Featured Articles' daily rotation, the intention of this would be to have a daily notice under MediaWiki:Watchdetails for that day's community task, or project. Generally, this will be a fixed rotation from Wikipedia's non-administrative backlog, but the community could elect to do a different special project for a given day. Each day should have only project, to keep the TODAY project extremely focused. An example of what the Watchdetails under this project would look like can be found at Wikipedia:Task of the Day/Example Watchdetails.

The watchlist, with this additional message to encourage collaboration and an end to our backlogs, will not have the option to "hide" this simple one-line message. In the event of a more pressing or important message coming up, such as Arbitration Committee elections, that notice would take precedence to the TODAY notice.

The watchlist will simply ask all users to contribute 5 a day, to help out--try for that, and more if you like!

Requirements to implement

~~Someone with the technical Wikiskill to create an automatically rotating system for the watchdetails page (one-time setup).~~ Done!
Admins willing to protect and edit the related pages as needed (probably extremely light work).
Decide on what sort of templating would be used (if any) for "reviewed" images (see Talk page).

Early 2008 trial run

Based on conversation Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Project here on the Administrator's Noticeboard, the initial 3 months (roughly) of this project will be daily tasks to encourage people to help with image tagging for fair use compliance. Once that issue is resolved in March 2008, the normal daily rotation will commence.

Bot-generated Image Backlog

The process for the image backlog will be very simple. Botmasters such as Betacommand and others will continue their work, as will anyone else using other tools. Categories such as Category:Disputed non-free images as of 12 January 2008 with lists of images are automatically generated each day. The initial run of the TODAY/5AD project will be to highlight the oldest daily image backlog at any given time in the Watchlist for all users, asking them to fix if possible at least 5 images per day. That is it. Given the sheer number of editors, it should be possible to easily do at least 1000~ images per day this way.

As everyone working on the project will know what the purpose of the backlog here is (it will be detailed on each backlog page), we can then link the oldest day's backlog at any given time in the MediaWiki watchlist. As a day's backlog clears, we then update the watchlist and keep moving forward. An example Watchdetails page from the trial Image run is at Wikipedia:Task of the Day/Example Watchdetails Image Project. As the bots just need to be told to also leave notices on that day's backlog page, beyond that it will require little human interaction--once a day's backlog is cleared, someone can just delete, archive, or lock it, and an admin will just need to update Watchdetails to have the next day's link. That is it. If possible, bot operators are asked to not post the full notifications here that they post on user talk pages, but a simple link to the image in question.

Sample rotation, after the Image Project is resolved

The below could be an example basic rotation. Each day, thanks to {{LOCALDAYNAME}}, which displays the current day by name, our Watchlist page will update as shown in this sample:

Saturday is Verifiability Day on Wikipedia! Please help to clean up and add sources to at least five of these articles today, and update the tagging on them.

You have $1 pages on your watchlist (excluding talk pages); you can display and edit the complete list.

There will be a basic 7 pages, for Sunday through Monday. The above example is showing the current Day according to our servers, which is now "Saturday". A full list of the initial sample seven tasks for the 5 A Day/TODAY project are:

Each page involved will be protected to allow only administrators to edit them for security reasons, and the code {{Wikipedia:Task of the Day/{{LOCALDAYNAME}}}} will be added to MediaWiki:Watchdetails to make this all possible.

How to recommend a daily special project outside of the rotation

Post a suggestion on the talk page here, at Wikipedia talk:Task of the Day, and the community can schedule special projects that will have a wide benefit for Wikipedia.