Hi,
First: I am a big fan of having 'one front door' for people that are trying to find answers to questions they do not know where to ask (
last year's
movement communications insights on this). I think a forum, actively moderated by people helping and pointing users to the right places, would be a huge improvement for community questions and input. Especially the one-click translation service is imho
a big plus in service in comparison to Meta.
It does however worry me that when I joined the forum last weekend to take a peek, I stumbled on a thread with a very specific question about Commons and giving permission via VRT. The thread had multiple replies, but no one had a real substantial
answer. Well, replies were along the lines of 'No, there is no template for this' and 'This should be discussed on Commons'. While the answers were somewhat correct, they were obviously not helpful for the person asking this specific question and, as far as
I could tell, none of the respondents were a member of our VRT teams. So this user was effectively not helped by posting the question on the forum.
Even more so, because the question on the forum was not noticed by VRT agents (most of us working on the permissions queues and Commons will have the /Noticeboard on Commons on our watch list and can be pinged if country or language specific
knowledge or advise is needed for a question), and secondly it will be more difficult for the people working from our end that will have to follow up if the person does decide to bring the question to Commons or VRT after all.
Besides that, with my MCDC hat on, I hope after this trial period we'll get to see the data on how many people interacted about the Movement Strategy that we have not heard from in the previous 5 years through any of the other platforms that
are in use to gather feedback. Already trying to watch several channels with Strategy discussions, I count on the MSG team to bring back these numbers and a summary of what is being discussed on the forum back to Meta. Even in a virtual world there is a limit
on how many channels a Wikimedian can watch.
NB: I see Sj's response crossed mine while I was writing, but let my example underline the issue of 'no unified notifications' and a possible problem with 'coherent archiving'.
Please also be aware G-translate does not know all languages we have projects in, some of which are however supported by Yandex that is an option to choose for the Wikipedia article translation tool already.
Best,
Ciell