Philippe,

I know what you mean about posting to VPs being hard. It need not be so difficult, however. We've talked about setting up a global announcement tool that would do the same.

Switching to a public forum: this seems like something to bring up on the wikimediameta-l list (and perhaps the translation coordination) list. This is a specific, commonly requested, and rarely accomplished task. In effect:

1. define the ~500 wikis that are 'active' and that we'd like to send messages to 2. define the Village Pump page or equivalent for every page. So if non exist, the main talk page; &c. 3. keep an announcement script running that uses a non-bot wiki user to post updates to these. given an announcement title, it should 3a) know how to check to see if a short announcement with that title exists 3b) default to the closest parent language in a language tree if none exist 3c) auto-inlcude a backlink to a global discussion page (default: on Meta). 4. maintain a page describing this announcement bot, in core langauges. 4a) as part of this process, keep a list of stock phrases translated into every language. "announcement", "a discussion about <FOO> is taking place on Meta", "Thank you, ~~~~", etc.

Is anyone working on something like this? Could we implement something like this before the next round of Strategic Planning updates? This seems like a year when we will need such an announce feature - particularly in a fashion that encourages local community discussion, something a sitenotice doesn't easily allow (it is temporary and has no obvious talk page).

SJ

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:

The process is essentially the same as it would be for any translation.  The problem with VP's is posting.... blech.... it takes a lot of time for me to do it.  Pretty well kills a morning.  I have heard rumors of a bot that can do it, but haven't seen it yet.

Philippe

On Oct 1, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:

...

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:

...

I'd be interested in leaving a personal message on the talk pages of the 1000 most active non-bot editors globally, intersected with the 10 most active editors on each wiki, asking for their input in some way. These are people for whom the current projects are worth a good deal of interest and effort...

There's no terrible rush for this - we could calculate who this would be, post the list, and discuss the idea of leaving a brief one liner and a link to a request-for-input.    We could probably centralize this discussion on meta and link to it from the VP's of top projects.

Speaking of which -- Philippe & Casey, is there a scripted process for posting a brief message intended for VP's, ask for translations, and then roll out the message as translations come in (with backlinks to a unified discussion page on meta)?

SJ

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