Hi Jérémie!

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 7:22 PM, Jérémie Roquet <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Do you think it would be possible somehow to receive the actual
> content, either by RSS (preferred) or by email (fine as well)?
>

At least for this Tech Showcase, "the actual content" is one title and one
link, by design. We don't want to write articles, just point to the action
where it is happening.

Here, I'm getting an email with only a link to a newsletter with only
> a link to the actual content. That's two levels of indirection


Yes, but the double step in this case (where the destination was a page out
of MediaWiki.org) is due to a missing feature:

Support interwiki links for new Newsletter issues
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T174664

When that task is solved (contributors welcome!), you will click the link
in the email or web notification, and you will land directly in the
corresponding non-MediaWiki.org page.

For now, we are trying to bypass this problem creating a topic in the Tech
Showcase Talk page, only to have a MediaWiki.org page to link to... A cheap
solution that I hope embarrasses someone enough to write a patch.  :)

We had a discussion about the ambassadors' announce format a few
> months ago (was it with Benoît or Johan? I think Benoît, but I'm not
> sure) and I already underlined how the mailing-list and RSS formats
> currently in use were great for people who have to deal with hundreds
> of notifications per week.
>
> I understand that this would mean more work for whoever writes the
> newsletter and that the mediawiki newsletter extension may not yet
> provide a way to send more content than just a title, so I'd be
> perfectly fine with a negative answer. I just want to draw attention
> to the the added cost to access the information.
>

It's a trade-off, right? Posting a newsletter issue reusing a title and a
URL that already exist takes literally one minute (in this case
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Edit_Conflicts/Feedback_Round_Test_Page
and the title of the email sent by Birgit to the wikitech-ambassadors
list). Writing a short informative article about the same takes more time,
enough to maybe send the notification tomorrow instead of today, or after
the weekend, or... maybe never because we are all so busy anyway. Besides,
why to write an article when the own creators already are reporting the
news in their own words so well?

The Newsletter extension allows for the distribution of traditional
newsletters (you write everything in a wiki page, you announce it when you
are done). However, the same software allows to create newsletters
consisting in... basically collections of title+link pointing to a wiki or
(some day) to any page that can be expressed with an interwiki link. Tech
Showcase bets on this new paradigm and I personally believe it is going to
be a success and a source of inspiration to others.

PS: and Brian was quicker commenting on the RSS feature request.

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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