--- Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net 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.
I know Wikisource has done this for various messages of short duration. Any admin can edit the Site notice for the subdomain without needing specail permission. It is not really a global notice technically speaking. The history at en.WS shows despite the Fund drive officially ending Jan 5, the progress bar remained on the site notice till a local admin removed it on Jan 12. Since then it has been used to advertise a few important votes and alert people of multi-step bot maintaince activity that they might have "corrected" if unaware. I would like to know if there is a real overuse of this feature anywhere or just a hypothectical concern. Not that concern is a bad thing, we should certainly discuss some best practices with regards to using this.
Birgitte SB
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