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
What should the notice say?
On 6/17/06, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net 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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, James Hare wrote:
What should the notice say?
Something like this, only in a variety of languages.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/June_notice
Now up on a number of Wikimedia sites; with a few large ones left to be targeted (trying not to unilaterally change the sitenotice without the help of a local admin on the larger projects).
Some wikipedias are trying a sitenotice implementation that only shows up for *logged-in* users; just as others have suggested in the past having fundraiser messages primarily targeted at non-logged-in users. all something to consider in working out what general policies should be for various flavours of site notice.
SJ
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.
--- 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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