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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