Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] [Wikimedia-l] Overloaded with CentralNotices

Hi Romaine, On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I assume that by "current load of negative feedback", you mean the comments by Grashoofd and Saschaporsche in this discussion? https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:De_kroeg#Wikimedia_Spam Thank you for resolving some misconceptions there (e.g. the assumption that these banners were shown to all Dutch Wikipedia readers - they are set to be displayed to logged-in users only); I also responded to some other points in that thread. About the FDC banners in general: The FDC - itself consisting of volunteer community members - considers it really important that the editing community gets to have a say in the process of how donation money is allocated to various Wikimedia organizations in the FDC process. See e.g. their recent blog post at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/25/call-for-community-input-funding-prop… (as mentioned there, this time the decisions are particularly difficult, as the amount requested in this round is already close to what's available for the whole year including next round's requests, $6 million). Without the work of the editing community, this money would not be available. Even if admittedly many editors are either not interested in participating in discussions on how to spend it, or do not have the time, I think it's still important to widely inform the community of this possibility. CentralNotice banners are currently the most effective way of making community members aware of this opportunity to influence the process, which happens twice a year (once a year if you only consider a particular organization/country), and is closing soon for this round. The country-specific FDC banners invite editors to comment specifically on the funding request from an organization in that country (Wikimedia Nederland in this case), which is assumed to be particularly relevant for them, as the majority of the planned spending in each proposal tends to be for activities supporting precisely this local editing community. I assume that "every week" is a rhetorical expression. However, it's true that this month there have been three campaigns specific to the Dutch Wikipedia/the Netherlands. Curiously, you are omitting the fact that it was yourself who ran two of them: "WMNL-register-WCN-2013" (inviting registration for the Wikiconferentie) - run on "high" priority for both logged-in and anonymous users, for 17 days in two countries "WMNL-edit-a-thon-DenHaag" (inviting participation in an edit-a-thon) - run on "high" priority for both logged-in and anonymous users, for two days in one country In comparison, the above mentioned FDC community review invitations run on "normal" priority and only for logged-in users, i.e. get vastly less exposure than these two event invitations. And I would argue that the number of users who are able to follow the invitation to participate in an online activity (like commenting on a wiki page in case of the FDC, or uploading images in case of WLM) is much higher than the number of users who are able to travel and spend the time to attend a physical event in a particular location. I'm not opposed to the use of CentralNotice to promote a nationwide annual conference. However, if one is concerned about banner blindness and worried that users are "overloaded with CentralNotices", it's probably worth asking the question if a single editathon in one city needs to be advertised with "high" priority countrywide banners to anonymous users. The English Wikipedia tends to use geotargeted watchlist notices for that kind of announcement instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice ). That's indeed something to be concerned about, and it's one reason for adding upcoming banner campaigns to the public planning page at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar , to facilitate coordination and discussion. It seems that this wasn't done for the above mentioned editathon banners. The current FDC banners have been announced there since October 1, and while I am taking the criticism that you are mentioning serious, I would also like to note that it is the first such criticism about them that is coming to my attention. All the FDC banners contain a link inviting to add missing translations (the global banner has been translated into >70 languages), but at least for major languages like Dutch, the intention is indeed to get them translated before they go live. As you said yourself on the De Kroeg, this banner was available in Dutch when it came live yesterday. Yes, that should not happen. The banners rely on a cookie to store this user choice. A possible reason could be that the cookie got lost e.g. when the browser was restarted, or it might be a bug. I agree, that's something worth looking into - I assume it would need additional technical work. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB