As I tried to say earlier on the Meta page, I am trying to make sure a banner works,
but decision making around banners should be done with the international
in dialogue with the local teams and the broader community. The
discussion on the mailing list and here is very very limited in
comparison to the number of people involved. This is concerning.Another concern is that the proposal above, to implement a diet with
a "cooldown" is I think enlarging an existing problem (banner
blindness) and creating a new problem (new participants who can't find
back the instructions page, aka less uploads). Let me try to explain.
Banner blindness is influenced by for major factors:
- The first factor is how many different banners a person sees in a
certain period. If someone sees 6 banners in a certain period, banner
blindness is worse than only seeing one banner in that period.
- The second factor is how many times a certain banner is visible
above the pages. If a banner is only shown five times, it is less
blinding than when seen 50 times. If a banner disappears, a lot of users
will think this banner is gone (but when a cyclus is in place the
annoyance can be larger, see 4).
- The third factor is on how many different wikis someone is active on
which the same banner is shown. If a diet is put in place (let's say 5x
shown) and a user has visited above that number of pages, a banner
disappears (or after clicking it away), that same banner will re-appear
when that user visits another wiki. A diet does not work cross wiki.
- The fourth factor is how many cycles a banner is shown to a single
user. (A cycle means that when someone got a banner a few times, after
some time (days/weeks) a banner can be shown again for a few times.)
While this is actually the same banner, a lot of users would experience
this as a second/third/etc banner, or in other words, the banner
blindness is higher.
(There can be also other factors in place, like banners that are
shown but are relevant for only an extremely low number of viewers, as
well as banner designs (like moving flags) that can create much
annoyance, but above I just focussed on the different ways of how the
same banner can be shown.)
The third factor (in my opinion) should have been fixed already five
years ago and is a long standing problem. However I do see some
progress, you can now disable certain type of campaigns in your
preferences if you do not want to see them: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-centralnotice-banners.
Concerning the proposal to put a diet in place with repeating cycles:
At first sight this proposal seems to be helpful to reduce banner
blindness and annoyance for banners. However, users would not get the
banner once, but four times (factor 4), which would cause 4x the
annoyance, and if they work cross wiki this would double/triple/etc the
amount of banners they experience (factor 3).
But more importantly: this diet would cause a major issue: new
editors can't find back the instructions page of the photo contest when
they re-visit Wikipedia (or the page is otherwise much harder to find
back). In other words: a lot less photos uploaded by a less diverse
amount of uploaders.
I am a huge fan of diets, but above all a banner (+diet) must by suitable
for the goal of the banner. In other words, the WLM banner has 2 goals:
1. to inform people about the contest ongoing, 2. after participants
have made photos they return to Wikipedia and then the banner has as
goal to enable participants to find back the instructions page. The
proposed diet is obstructing the second goal and is damaging for the
photo contest.
So if you as local organisers do not wish a bad effect because a diet is in place, replying on the Meta page and/or here on the mailing list would be needed.
Romaine