User:Jeblad/Maintenance threads

Threads on talk pages can be used as maintenance messages instead of the usual maintenance templates. This has several nice properties, for example will the author not be disturbed by activities on the discussion page, and in particular she will not have edit conflicts in the article itself. There will although be notifications if the preferences are set so the page is added to the watchlist, and notifications are enabled for watchlist changes.

The core idea is to use the talk page as a source, but filter it down to a list of important maintenance threads. Not all of the threads are important enough, and the talk page can have a lot more threads than can be posted at any time. To do the filtering the regexes can be stashed away in a JSON structure, together with additional keys for log entries and categories.

Refinements could be to add some kind of microvoting for grades, some kind of analysis tool to automatically flag maintenance needs, at least how to flag some maintenance threads as solved, and perhaps other tools for managing maintenance threads.