Teun Spaans wrote:
On the english wiki, I am a member of the Military
history
WikiProject. There is a newsletter, which appears every monbth or two
months. All members are notified on their talk page. By a bot. Surely,
if a project can manage this, the core of wikimedia can mange this? I
admit, some volunteers are needed to do this.
Although recently I have been only lurking on this WikiProject, I must
speak positively of these newsletters. Whether they will succeed in
getting us lurkers to contribute is pure guesswork, but it will improve
the possibility. Keep up the good work.
Do any other WikiProjects have such newsletters?
Yes, the language is a problem. At the moment I see no
alternative to
English. Translation by babelfish gives terrible results. At least at
start, there wont be volunteers able to translate it. You are right
that the next complaint will be that the message is in english. When
we have taken this step, and the complaint comes, we can invite them
to translate it.
Sometimes the only answer to such complaints is, "This is a volunteer
project; what are you doing to improve it?"
One of the problems with the current communication is
that we rely a
lot on "pull", not on "push". The information is posted somewhere,
and
it is left to the wikipedians to visiti these places frequently and
read it. It is up to the wikipedians to discover these places. It is
up to the wikipedians to go to these places frequently. It is up to
the wikipedians to read them It is up to the wikipedians to act on it.
This holds true for communication from the foundation. This is true
for information from the local chapters. This is true for information
from commons, such as deletions. It is true for policy changes on
commons.
It took a while to realize that your push/pull analogy was taken from
the language of addressing computer stacks. :-)
If a person goes to a page frequently but unsuccessfully to see if there
are any additions he soon becomes discouraged and stops looking there.
The stacks need sorting. Stacks operate on a Last In First Out (LIFO)
basis. If everything is put into one big stack the oldest entries wil
soon be lost regardless of their importance. We need more conveniently
sized stacks. Some of these are made available by default, others, such
as study group nesletters, require a positive effort to subscribe.
These lists could be added to the top of one's watchlist with a flag to
show that there have been new additions to the list.
There is no information brought to the door. I think it
might be time
to change all this. We might start about thinking delivering selected
information to the people on their talk pages. information in the
village pumps.
Perhaps, but that needs to be done selectively to avoid overwhelming them.
I dont say we should communicate everything to
everyone, but we may
start thinking about such a change in our communication strategy.
We are already communicating to the outside world based on "push".
When the english wiki reaches it n-th million article, whap, out goes
a press release. The same for commons: when the 1 million images
milestone was reached. We dont wait till the media visit our sites to
discover it, we go out and tell them.
It wouldnt be bad when we followed the same line internally.
Worth considering.
Ec