Assuming that the most recent rough timeline I've got is still accurate, Wikidata will have deployed Phase II of its features by, at the latest, early January. I'd prefer that we wait at least a week or two after that for the project to re-stabilize before we make the big announcement, as I do not want to have people coming in right as we're working out the bugs from the Phase II deployment. That would mean, ballpark, that I'd be most comfortable with us doing this early February. That is in the timeline you gave.

I would also like to stress the importance of the WMF communicating with these two mailing lists and giving us at least a 48 hour warning before the banners go live. I want to make sure that the local admins (and everyone else) knows that we're going to potentially get a large wave of new users. Call me a cynic, but considering how drama-free and smooth Wikidata has been, I've kinda been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm not saying that the people there now would be hostile to the people that might be joining after the announcement, but I am saying that having people on hand in case there is trouble is going to be important. Okay, so yes, I am truly a cynic of epic proportions. On a more positive note, it would also give me time to make sure that all of the project's help pages are cleaned up and that we have a nice centralized location that lists said pages where we can point the new people to.

Thanks for the idea,
Sven

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,

I'm curious what folks here think about making some noise about the
two most recent additions to the Wikimedia family around January or
February. Wikivoyage is still finishing up the beta phase (image
transfers, logo import etc.) this month, and Wikidata isn't live as a
repository yet -- but we could set a target date that would work for
both projects.

What I'm imagining is an actual banner on Wikimedia projects
announcing the launch of both Wikivoyage and Wikidata, pointing to a
landing page explaining what these projects are, how to participate,
etc. That page could be drafted on Meta. Then interested folks would
visit the projects to learn more and get involved.

Wikimedia projects obviously have an enormous reach and I think this
could help create awareness and build community -- but it could also
be an unwelcome influx in the early stages. This could be regulated by
running a banner only for logged in users, or x% of readers.

Thoughts?

Erik

--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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