Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
As announced earlier, the Communications
committee is coordinating
the use of the site-wide notices on Wikimedia Foundation sites. Right
now, we need to call attention to Wikimania and encourage people to
register, so starting sometime tomorrow we will be putting up a brief
project-wide notice about this. We expect the notice to run for about
a week.
When this use of the site notice ends it should be blanked again
(except for any separate notices to anonymous users being used for
fundraising). We don't want these to be overused, so an extended
silent period for the site notice should follow. After that, the next
use will probably be for the fundraiser, assuming that committee is
organized and a date settled on.
--Michael Snow
Does this mean that project admins can't use the site-wide notices for
internal use, such as major policy changes or bureaucrat elections? I
fail to see why (provided that other admins are in agreement that the
notice should go up) a project like ru.wikibooks needs to get special
permission from the WMF in order to use this function.
Yes, they shouldn't be overused, but at the same time this is
something that can and should be under local project control.
Widespread notices on mulitple sites is something that perhaps should
get WMF coordination, but that is another issue entirely.
I should clarify what I meant, sorry about the confusion. We're
coordinating the use of site notices for Foundation business that
affects all projects, and my intent was to inform people of our plans
for such use. We are not taking away the ability of individual projects
to use the site notice for local business that affects only that
project. As a general matter, I don't think such uses need to receive
clearance on a Foundation level, although I hope that if anyone
anticipates conflicts with our planned uses, they would let us know so
we can resolve that.
Site notices should not be overused, so I do think silent periods are
important. However, if between this Wikimania announcement and the next
fundraiser, a project has a major announcement that requires use of a
site notice, I didn't intend to imply that this was prohibited.
--Michael Snow