Keeping up with everything at Wikipedia is a daunting task. In
English, there are two medium to high traffic mailing lists (four for
those interested in multi-lingual and technical issues), the
announcements page, Meta-Wikipedia, and the uncounted issues
being debated on Talk pages scattered about. And that's assuming
you don't speak any other languages. Of course, if you're
interested in what's happening on, say, the Spanish Wikipedia but
*don't* speak Spanish, things become even more difficult. How can
we make it easier to stay informed, especially for causal
Wikipedians and interested observers?
I propose we take a cue from the Debian Project
(
http://www.debian.org/). It's a very complex project, with a myriad
of mailing lists. For people who don't have time to eat, drink and
breathe Debian, there's the Debian Weekly News, a weekly email
newsletter that summarizes the major threads on the lists,
announces new subprojects and software, and provides security
update notices.
Debian Weekly News is run by one person, with occassional
submissions from others. We can do better, using wiki
collaboration. We could set up a page using a template on the
meta. When people notice something of interest happening, they
post a summary on the Wikipedia Weekly News page, along with
links to where the action is (wiki page, mailing list thread, etc). On
a given day and time, someone puts the text into an email, and
sends it out over the new WWN-L mailing list. Then, the wiki page
is archived, wiped, and the template is reposted, ready for next
week's issue. Eventually, we could work up a script to automate
the sending and archiving.
Ideally, we would have correspondents from each language with an
active wiki. These correspondents could translate news from their
wikis into English, and then translate the whole newsletter into
their own languages. This would be a bit of work, but if there's
enough interest, we could have several Wikipedia Weekly News
lists, allowing people to keep up with project-wide news in their
own languages. Also, representitives from wikitech-l would be
good; they could summerize the tech discussions going on in
layman's terms.
I've put up a page for working on this at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Weekly_News , as well a
sample newsletter at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWN_sample
(obviously I need a lot of help coming up with a workable template).
If there's enough interest in getting this going, I think it would do
much to improve communication through the project.
- Stephen G.
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Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org