2012/8/23 Tilman Bayer <[email protected]>: > On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 4:27 AM, Strainu <[email protected]> wrote: >> 2012/8/22 Sumana Harihareswara <[email protected]>: >>> On 08/21/2012 06:29 PM, Ryan Lane wrote: >>>> When I'm doing an ops change that is user facing I write a blog post >>>> and I post something to wikitech-l. I don't bother using village pump. >>>> There's a reason for that. There's a *lot* of village pumps. Hundreds. >>>> In different languages. I can't possibly handle that many different >>>> conversations in that many languages. Even if I only post to 2-3 of >>>> them, I still have to have the same conversation over and over again >>>> with different sets of people. >>>> >>>> We need a global system for communication for things like this. >>>> Everyone should be a part of a single communication thread about >>>> changes. All posts in the thread should be able to be translated in a >>>> crowd-sourced manner. >>> >>> Just a quick note that the wikitech-ambassadors list >>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors is >>> helping with this, and is going to be helping more -- I'll wait for >>> Guillaume to lead the conversation about this, hopefully in the next 2 >>> weeks. >> >> You guys (and by that I mean "anybody who doesn't regularly edit a >> text-producing project[1], but needs to make announcements from time >> to time"; this includes most of the WMF employees) seem to have a >> problem with village pumps and instead invent all kind of alternative >> communication methods, like mailing lists, IRC meetings, Meta, WMF >> wiki etc., with the sole excuse being "they're hundreds of them". >> >> Well, let me tell you in plain English with no regard to political >> correctness: your excuse sucks. >> >> It sucks mainly because automation was invented half a century ago - >> I've said this here before and I'm saying it again: it takes at the >> very most 2 days to write and test a script that can post a message to >> any number of pages. There could be thousands of projects, the effort >> from the poster would be the same. >> >> It also sucks because the vast majority of contributors don't >> know/don't want to use IRC, mailing list or even other wikis [2]. > Yes, that's true, it has been a major learning for WMF in recent years > that while all these (and also the Wikimedia blog) can be useful > channels, many Wikipedians don't leave their home wikis and expect > really important announcements to be delivered there in some form. In > our Wikimania talk, MZMcBride and I gave an overview of the mechanisms > that are currently available to do so.
Can you please point me to the location of the slides (if available)? > >> Those who know and want to use those alternative methods are >> discouraged by the scarce organization of the information. >> >> Finally, it sucks because you basically expect people to look for your >> announcements and extract the information, when the whole idea of an >> announcement is to push the information from the originator to the >> receiver. >> >> Sumana, my understanding of the "ambassador" concept is someone that >> takes the information from you and puts it on their home wiki(s). >> That's great, except it's unlikely you will find users from all the >> 200+ languages and even if you do, people quit, go on vacations etc., >> leading to information loss. An automated English message on the pump, >> translated on the spot would be much better. >> >> Strainu > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery (a bot > operated by MZMcBride) can do exactly that. Great! What's the holdup to using it more? > > It was used by the WMF engineering department to inform all of the > projects about the IPv6 deployment in June (e.g. > https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Juin_2012#Update_on_IPv6 > ), and all non-Wikipedia projects about changes they needed to make to > their main page in order for it being displayed properly on mobile > devices (e.g. > https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/WikiWoordenboek:De_Kroeg/archief19#Mobile_view_as_default_view_coming_soon > ) Hmmm, I remember the message, but I hadn't realized it was delivered by a bot at the time. > > This still relies on local Wikimedians translating that village pump > message into their language, many are doing so with those > announcements. And, as Ryan says, it is difficult to follow up on > discussions in all those (ca. 600) village pumps, so those messages > need to point back to a central venue for feedback. Agreed! Why not use a standard message for the feedback link, that could be translated once and reused? > > And, this is obviously a channel which can only be used for > announcements of some degree of importance. One might be tempted to > create a separate "Wikitech ambassadors village pump" and have the bot > post there. I'm all in favor of "some importance" being less rather than more :) I don't think 10 or 15 messages per month would be considered too much, if the information is relevant to the project (i.e. don't send Wikisource-specific updates to Wikipedias) > But the new broadcasting functionality that is being > developed as part of the Echo and Flow projects will offer a much > better solution (basically, as user on a Wikimedia project you will be > able to subscribe to receive notifications from information channels > across projects, and I'm sure that one of these channels could offer > such tech updates). I don't know many details about those, but I do have 2 observations here. First, the fact that sometime in the future there will be a better solution should not stop us from implementing quicker fixes. Second, if there isn't a history of those somewhere easily reachable, people will quickly forget about notifications. Strainu _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
