Saturday, September 08, 2007

Fundraiser 2007 - communication with projects

Well, dealing with the Fundraiser 2007 I am trying to involve the whole of the communities. But that seems easier that it really is ... one thinks: oh well, there are the village pumps and you just go around them ... or you go through the mailing lists (but not all projects have one) ... or in the worst case you use the various chat rooms ... well no, it does not really work ... a really well structured communication in this specific moment is not possible - and in some way we should think about a solution.

Village pumps:

I am getting step by step to them - there is no all comprehensive page - but even if there was there is one huge problem: they are structured very different from one project to the other. Often I posted "somewhere" without even understanding if it was the right place ... some have extra pages for messages written in a different language from theirs (but then again: there you don't reach a maximum number of people who maybe would help). Some have different sectors for different themes ... but again: there you don't reach all potential people, just the part of them that goes to the "general" village pump page. Uhmmmmmm ...... not sure how to sort this out ... and no: I would be agains a page for special "foundation information" since again it would be read by only a part of the users/editors and these would probably be more or less the same ones who read foundation list ....

Now I asked for a bot that can help us to add new sections to specific pages within the pywikipediabot framework - this would at least make one part of it easier, not having to go around all projects, but still the "how to communicate effectively" problem remains ....

For now, until we maybe get a better solution, I would like to ask people from the various projects to check the page where I list the village pumps and change the links I have there to the page where they want to have the messages added - for all projects please - this will help all of us to live an easier wiki-life. During the next days I will then make another round around the various Village Pumps asking people to correct the link on the page above if necessary.

I am sorry, but for now I don't see a different way to get this on the way.

And please: all links to all projects are needed - also the smallest ones ... they all have the same relevance.

Thanks!!!

1 comment:

Jon Harald Søby said...

I have a few suggestions for technical changes that could solve this quite easily, but that would require some new MediaWiki messages and nothing more.

First, create a message called "Adminnotice", which would be shown above the normal "Sitenotice". This one has to be central only, and the local wikis should get the message automatically from Meta. It would only be visible for administrators, of course, and would have a message saying "To make the sitenotice for this year's fundraiser available in your language, to this and that.".

Then, the administrators seeing that message would translate a new MediaWiki message into their language. Let's call this one "Sitenotice-fundraiser2007". The message ID would need to be different every year, to avoid the problem we have had earlier – old messages sticking (for the '06 fundraiser, some inactive Wiktionaries and other projects still showed '05 notices).

These messages would in turn be turned on centrally by a developer. With this solution, we won't have the problem that local sitenotices don't override the fundraiser one. It's a win-win-win situation.

This way we would ensure that only the relevant people (administrators, e.g. those with the technical possibility of translating MediaWiki messages) get the message about translating it, and that they are made aware of it inobtrusively yet effectively (IMO, posting a message in every village pump is far from effective).

Khalil Gibran über die Musik

Die Musik wirkt wie die Sonne, die alle Blumen des Feldes mit ihrem Strahlen zum Leben erweckt. ( Khalil Gibran ) Image by Pete Linforth fr...