I'm pleased to announce that the 2011 Board Election now accepts candidates. The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 2nd to 23:59 UTC May 22nd. The election will fill the three community-elected board seats that are currently held by Ting Chen, Kat Walsh and Samuel Klein. More information on what it means to be a board member, who is eligible to be a candidate and how to submit your candidacy can be found on the election pages on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011 .
As always, help with translation is very much appreciated. The translation coordination page can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011/Translation .
Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections@wikimedia.org.
On behalf of the Election Committee, Jon Harald Søby http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects: 1. Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method... [3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:52 PM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Mz did a RfC about it awhile ago on Meta, No idea what happened to it.
But I do agree on them being disruptive.... Put it this way, I permanently hide all sitenotices with CSS now for all the projects i'm majorly active on. -Peachey
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:56 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:52 PM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Mz did a RfC about it awhile ago on Meta, No idea what happened to it.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_banners
But I do agree on them being disruptive....
I agree. the main annoyance is that after a delay, they cause the edit box to move down, sometimes causing the user to click on something they didnt mean to click on.
2011/5/19 church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
... And since you mentioned it, why is the POTY banner English-only?
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
2011/5/19 church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com:
- Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only
on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week)
I think such measures would bring more complaints like the ones we've had for the survey in late April., where people complained they did not have a chance to respond to the survey because they hadn't noticed the banner.
Strainu
Thanks for bringing this up, Tobias. I have been pondering about the same, and the thinking points you give sound sensible. I would like to add another, which might seem obvious, and that is geo- and project targeting. Do you really need centralnotice on all projects, or only on a few.
Because of the high amount of notices lately (not only centralnotice, but also local notices by the community) they do indeed become annoying. However, more importantly it seems that there might be negative impact because people get used to them, and will start ignoring them. Not just by technical means, but also because they simply devaluate.
Lodewijk
2011/5/19 church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... [2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method... [3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
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church.of.emacs.ml, 19/05/2011 10:52:
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
The first thing to do is 4): standard templates like [1] and [2] are ok, while the recent "march/may updates"[3] and POTY [4] seem unnecessarily big. 1) is the easiest and most obvious; such banners could also be restricted only to users with at least 100/200/whatever number of edits, but e.g. I wouldn't know how to do so; some documentation would be useful. 3) is not necessary in itself, but it is so if there are many banners: CentralNotice shouldn't be in permanent use, so if there are many requests there should be some scheduling.
It should also be considered that the CentralNotice kills local community sitenotices, although they are usually more important and interesting for local users. Local communities should be able to use the sitenotice at least for some periods of the year.
Finally, I wonder how useful are big banners such as the "May update". I like it (although I had to hide it a dozen times a day on several wikis), but I didn't see any effect. Reading the letter is not so useful in itself; it's useful if there's some discussion. There was a long discussion on it.wiki when the board resolution was posted on the village pump, but nothing after the CentralNotice. A local, very small sitenotice with a link to a local discussion is probably much more effective; perhaps it would be nice to offer communities to disable the CentralNotice if they implement a local sitenotice or other solution.
Nemo
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=boardvotecandidates [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=WMDE_community_budget [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=May2011Update [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method=listNoticeDetail¬ice=poty2010
A way to tie clicking "hide" to an *account* rather than just by storing it as a local cookie would also be a good move.
Tom / ErrantX
On 19 May 2011 10:36, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
church.of.emacs.ml, 19/05/2011 10:52:
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
The first thing to do is 4): standard templates like [1] and [2] are ok, while the recent "march/may updates"[3] and POTY [4] seem unnecessarily big.
- is the easiest and most obvious; such banners could also be
restricted only to users with at least 100/200/whatever number of edits, but e.g. I wouldn't know how to do so; some documentation would be useful. 3) is not necessary in itself, but it is so if there are many banners: CentralNotice shouldn't be in permanent use, so if there are many requests there should be some scheduling.
It should also be considered that the CentralNotice kills local community sitenotices, although they are usually more important and interesting for local users. Local communities should be able to use the sitenotice at least for some periods of the year.
Finally, I wonder how useful are big banners such as the "May update". I like it (although I had to hide it a dozen times a day on several wikis), but I didn't see any effect. Reading the letter is not so useful in itself; it's useful if there's some discussion. There was a long discussion on it.wiki when the board resolution was posted on the village pump, but nothing after the CentralNotice. A local, very small sitenotice with a link to a local discussion is probably much more effective; perhaps it would be nice to offer communities to disable the CentralNotice if they implement a local sitenotice or other solution.
Nemo
[1] < http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&...
[2] < http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&...
[3] < http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&...
[4] < http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method...
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I thought these notices *are* displayed for logged-in users only, if they aren't, then they should. At least the POTY notice doesn't show up for me when I'm logged out.
I agree with you in regards to the use of images, and I think it should be constrained to fundraising banners. "Size and intrusiveness" could be proportional to the importance of the message, but the "notice" should be "noticeable" as many editors just don't see it if it's too plain. However, I think Thomas Morton's suggestion to tie the "hide" option to accounts instead of cookies would solve that and most of the other concerns, since the main annoyance seems to be that the banners keep reappearing despite clicking the [x] over and over again.
The importance of such notices is that they give editors the chance to know what's going on and take part in various community processes, which are usually very hard to find and figure out, especially for those editors who are working mainly on content, or haven'ts been around for years. So I think there are huge positives there and they shouldn't be impacted if there becomes a guideline.
Regards, -- Orionist
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 12:52 PM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@ googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... [2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method... [3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I think using images for the POTY competition is also justifiable, :) given the context. But, yes, images need to be considered carefully.
As I recently mentioned on Meta - we could really do with some reasearch into the effectiveness of different sized images as compared to text for click through rates. It could well be that an image banner does improve click through and (in the case of the fund raiser) donations... but I can't find any actual A/B tests (or any other tests) to see if this is actually the case or not.
Also; Part of the problem is how it loads (i.e. as pointed out elsewhere the page can "jump" as the notice suddenly appears). If that could be fixed that would be one of my main concerns addressed :)
Tom/ErrantX On 19 May 2011 11:39, Orionist orion.ist@gmail.com wrote:
I thought these notices *are* displayed for logged-in users only, if they aren't, then they should. At least the POTY notice doesn't show up for me when I'm logged out.
I agree with you in regards to the use of images, and I think it should be constrained to fundraising banners. "Size and intrusiveness" could be proportional to the importance of the message, but the "notice" should be "noticeable" as many editors just don't see it if it's too plain. However, I think Thomas Morton's suggestion to tie the "hide" option to accounts instead of cookies would solve that and most of the other concerns, since the main annoyance seems to be that the banners keep reappearing despite clicking the [x] over and over again.
The importance of such notices is that they give editors the chance to know what's going on and take part in various community processes, which are usually very hard to find and figure out, especially for those editors who are working mainly on content, or haven'ts been around for years. So I think there are huge positives there and they shouldn't be impacted if there becomes a guideline.
Regards,
Orionist
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 12:52 PM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@ googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&...
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method...
[3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Thomas Morton, 19/05/2011 12:50:
Also; Part of the problem is how it loads (i.e. as pointed out elsewhere the page can "jump" as the notice suddenly appears). If that could be fixed that would be one of my main concerns addressed :)
By the way, it's https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26234 It may be easier to fix for non-geotargeted notices.
Nemo
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 3:50 AM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas@googlemail.com
wrote:
It could well be that an image banner does improve click through and (in the case of the fund raiser) donations... but I can't find any actual A/B tests (or any other tests) to see if this is actually the case or not.
It does. We tested it for the fundraiser, I'll see if I can dig up the results of that test.
pb
That would be great :) I did have a look when researching for the board elections but couldn't find any hard figures.
Tom/ErrantX
On 19 May 2011 18:15, Philippe Beaudette philippe@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 3:50 AM, Thomas Morton < morton.thomas@googlemail.com
wrote:
It could well be that an image banner does improve click through and (in the case of the fund raiser) donations... but I
can't
find any actual A/B tests (or any other tests) to see if this is actually the case or not.
It does. We tested it for the fundraiser, I'll see if I can dig up the results of that test.
pb _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Orionist wrote:
I thought these notices *are* displayed for logged-in users only, if they aren't, then they should. At least the POTY notice doesn't show up for me when I'm logged out.
It would also help if certain votes/etc. could be targeted to only eligible voters. For example, if a vote requires X edits, having a wgEditCount or a wgGlobalEditCount variable would be invaluable. That way the banners could be configured to be hidden for most users during runs such as the Picture of the Year campaign, where most users are not eligible to vote.
I know there's a bug about wgEditCount already. It might make sense to file one about wgGlobalEditCount as well.
I encourage everyone to take a look at the previous Requests for comment: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_banners.
I just started a guidelines page at Meta-Wiki as well: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice_banner_guidelines. It'd be great if someone could make that page not suck. :-) (I'm assuming a similar page doesn't already exist; if so, please feel free to redirect.)
MZMcBride
On 05/19/2011 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
Agreed with this in relation to the Board elections. Just users with accounts are able to vote or to be candidates. And those who are interested in our governing should be able to read it on Meta, which should have clear note on Main Page that there are ongoing elections.
Presenting to 400M of readers that we have democratically elected Board is not so important and may irritate them.
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/19/2011 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
Agreed with this in relation to the Board elections. Just users with accounts are able to vote or to be candidates. And those who are interested in our governing should be able to read it on Meta, which should have clear note on Main Page that there are ongoing elections.
There are many people who would be legitimately interested in board elections, but who don't visit Meta on a regular basis (or at all, for that matter).
Kirill
On 05/19/2011 05:42 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/19/2011 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
Agreed with this in relation to the Board elections. Just users with accounts are able to vote or to be candidates. And those who are interested in our governing should be able to read it on Meta, which should have clear note on Main Page that there are ongoing elections.
There are many people who would be legitimately interested in board elections, but who don't visit Meta on a regular basis (or at all, for that matter).
Then notices just on Main Pages? I don't think that a random user from search engines is interested in our governing.
Not to say that if someone is interested in Wiki*p*edia governing, may be introduced into the whole process after two or three pages, starting from [[Wikipedia]] in any language.
As an account owner on LiveJournal, but without any activity, I am getting emails which inform me about the process of their elections. However, I don't remember that I saw that online (although I am very rarely there).
I have no precise idea how, but it is obvious that we need to lower amount of our own advertising to random users.
Hello,
When we have a POTY contest or board elections, that is certainly not very exciting for non Wikimedians. But when the picture of the year is actually chosen? And when the WMF publishes an annual report written for the public?
We had the problem with the site notice on nl.wp recently when we wanted to announce our Ten Years Dutch Wikipedia event. - There were already two notices! I would welcome to run notices not permanently, e.g. have your Ten event announced for a week now and then again for a week in june.
Ziko
2011/5/19 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On 05/19/2011 05:42 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/19/2011 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
Agreed with this in relation to the Board elections. Just users with accounts are able to vote or to be candidates. And those who are interested in our governing should be able to read it on Meta, which should have clear note on Main Page that there are ongoing elections.
There are many people who would be legitimately interested in board elections, but who don't visit Meta on a regular basis (or at all, for that matter).
Then notices just on Main Pages? I don't think that a random user from search engines is interested in our governing.
Not to say that if someone is interested in Wiki*p*edia governing, may be introduced into the whole process after two or three pages, starting from [[Wikipedia]] in any language.
As an account owner on LiveJournal, but without any activity, I am getting emails which inform me about the process of their elections. However, I don't remember that I saw that online (although I am very rarely there).
I have no precise idea how, but it is obvious that we need to lower amount of our own advertising to random users.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/19/2011 05:42 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
wrote:
On 05/19/2011 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
Agreed with this in relation to the Board elections. Just users with accounts are able to vote or to be candidates. And those who are interested in our governing should be able to read it on Meta, which should have clear note on Main Page that there are ongoing elections.
There are many people who would be legitimately interested in board elections, but who don't visit Meta on a regular basis (or at all, for
that
matter).
Then notices just on Main Pages? I don't think that a random user from search engines is interested in our governing.
Main Pages tend to be far more reader-facing than editor-facing, in my experience; I'd be surprised if all that many regular editors visit them.
A better alternative, in my opinion, would be editor-facing pages such as watchlists, noticeboards, etc.
Not to say that if someone is interested in Wiki*p*edia governing, may
be introduced into the whole process after two or three pages, starting from [[Wikipedia]] in any language.
As an account owner on LiveJournal, but without any activity, I am getting emails which inform me about the process of their elections. However, I don't remember that I saw that online (although I am very rarely there).
I have no precise idea how, but it is obvious that we need to lower amount of our own advertising to random users.
Being able to have banners displayed to particular subsets of users, as MZMcBride suggested, would go a long way to solving the problem. Given that the voting eligibility is based purely on a technical criterion, there's no reason why we couldn't display notices only to those users actually eligible to participate.
Kirill
Its become so obnoxious I have used Ad-block plus's rules to prevent it from loading, because I got sick if having half my screen taken over with obnoxious banners that I really dont like seeing, Watchlist notices given their low intrusion levels work a lot better.
John
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/19/2011 05:42 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
wrote:
On 05/19/2011 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
Agreed with this in relation to the Board elections. Just users with accounts are able to vote or to be candidates. And those who are interested in our governing should be able to read it on Meta, which should have clear note on Main Page that there are ongoing elections.
There are many people who would be legitimately interested in board elections, but who don't visit Meta on a regular basis (or at all, for
that
matter).
Then notices just on Main Pages? I don't think that a random user from search engines is interested in our governing.
Main Pages tend to be far more reader-facing than editor-facing, in my experience; I'd be surprised if all that many regular editors visit them.
A better alternative, in my opinion, would be editor-facing pages such as watchlists, noticeboards, etc.
Not to say that if someone is interested in Wiki*p*edia governing, may
be introduced into the whole process after two or three pages, starting from [[Wikipedia]] in any language.
As an account owner on LiveJournal, but without any activity, I am getting emails which inform me about the process of their elections. However, I don't remember that I saw that online (although I am very rarely there).
I have no precise idea how, but it is obvious that we need to lower amount of our own advertising to random users.
Being able to have banners displayed to particular subsets of users, as MZMcBride suggested, would go a long way to solving the problem. Given that the voting eligibility is based purely on a technical criterion, there's no reason why we couldn't display notices only to those users actually eligible to participate.
Kirill _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 05/19/2011 05:59 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
A better alternative, in my opinion, would be editor-facing pages such as watchlists, noticeboards, etc.
Feature already exists, via Javascript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js/watchlist.js
Perhaps make it a core feature of CentralNotice? I.e. an option: "Display only to registered users and only on watchlists"?
Regards, Tobias
The POTY banner was announced on this list with no objections.
On Thursday, May 19, 2011, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method... [3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
I asked Mono to announce POTY centralnotice use on Foundation-l after he made a request on Meta. The only consensus to MZ's RfC on Meta [1] was that Global banners could be used for Non-fundraising reasons after consensus is achieved for the proposal and the banner itself on Meta first.
Currently, there are no clear guidelines on the community's use of central-notice - multiple geo-located, chapter-requested campaigns have been running on central-notice without objection. Global-banners have been used for things like the March/May update and for soliciting candidates for the board election.
It's time to consider guidelines if we are going to have Global banners.
Theo
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_banners
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_banners On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Mono mium monomium@gmail.com wrote:
The POTY banner was announced on this list with no objections.
On Thursday, May 19, 2011, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&...
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method...
[3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Theo10011 wrote:
Currently, there are no clear guidelines on the community's use of central-notice - multiple geo-located, chapter-requested campaigns have been running on central-notice without objection. Global-banners have been used for things like the March/May update and for soliciting candidates for the board election.
It's time to consider guidelines if we are going to have Global banners.
You seem to have missed my e-mail posted two hours prior to your e-mail.
MZMcBride
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:11 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Theo10011 wrote:
Currently, there are no clear guidelines on the community's use of central-notice - multiple geo-located, chapter-requested campaigns have
been
running on central-notice without objection. Global-banners have been
used
for things like the March/May update and for soliciting candidates for
the
board election.
It's time to consider guidelines if we are going to have Global banners.
You seem to have missed my e-mail posted two hours prior to your e-mail.
MZMcBride
Ya, I must've missed that.
I'm going to add some suggestions, it would be great if anyone else also takes a look at it.
Also, we need a page on Meta where any future requests could be placed and voted on, the current logging page for central notice could eventually be replaced with it.
Theo
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Also, we need a page on Meta where any future requests could be placed and voted on, the current logging page for central notice could eventually be replaced with it.
Just speaking for myself, I think voting to pre-approve every non-fundraising banner sounds like too much bureaucracy.
I personally feel that what we need is a guideline and/or banner system that makes it crystal clear to anyone wanting to run a banner, describing in detail what is and isn't appropriate including examples. But requiring voting just to do anything makes me cringe, especially when there are several technical options for hiding banners.
We should say what we want as a community, what we don't want, and then trust people to use good judgement. Just like anything else on a wiki, it's easy to take down a campaign the instant we don't want it, so if people don't use good judgement and ignore the guidelines then we can remove a banner, point to the guideline, and ask they discuss it further.
Steven
Steven Walling wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Also, we need a page on Meta where any future requests could be placed and voted on, the current logging page for central notice could eventually be replaced with it.
Just speaking for myself, I think voting to pre-approve every non-fundraising banner sounds like too much bureaucracy.
I personally feel that what we need is a guideline and/or banner system that makes it crystal clear to anyone wanting to run a banner, describing in detail what is and isn't appropriate including examples. But requiring voting just to do anything makes me cringe, especially when there are several technical options for hiding banners.
We should say what we want as a community, what we don't want, and then trust people to use good judgement. Just like anything else on a wiki, it's easy to take down a campaign the instant we don't want it, so if people don't use good judgement and ignore the guidelines then we can remove a banner, point to the guideline, and ask they discuss it further.
Yes, very well said.
I'd also say that it'd be very good for someone completely uninvolved in the event/project/whatever that's requesting a banner to be the one to give the go-ahead and approve the specific parameters (only on certain projects, certain languages, etc.). People are very passionate about whatever they're working on, so it often becomes easy to think that _everyone_ needs to be informed about whatever it is. Having someone who is uninvolved assess the request for reasonableness is a good way of ensuring some level of sanity.
MZMcBride
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@ googlemail.com> wrote:
Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days
Factually incorrect: it displayed to every reader for only 3 days. It then switched (as was always planned) to logged in users only.
pb
Philippe Beaudette wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@ googlemail.com> wrote:
Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days
Factually incorrect: it displayed to every reader for only 3 days. It then switched (as was always planned) to logged in users only.
Planned where and by whom?
MZMcBride
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:41 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Philippe Beaudette wrote:
Factually incorrect: it displayed to every reader for only 3 days. It
then
switched (as was always planned) to logged in users only.
Planned where and by whom?
MZMcBride
The Board Elections committee. We felt that it was important to display the notice to logged-out readers for a short time, because there are many people (myself included) who consider themselves part of the Wikimedia community, but do not log in regularly.
On 05/19/2011 07:13 PM, Philippe Beaudette wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@ googlemail.com> wrote:
Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days
Factually incorrect: it displayed to every reader for only 3 days. It then switched (as was always planned) to logged in users only.
Sorry, my bad.
Regards, Tobias
Hello Tobias,
on zh-wp we use our local central notice quite often and in my opinion it is accepted by most users. We use it to announce admin election, vote for policies and other issues like quality initiatives or call for articles. Most of these activities are on village pump, but most users don't have the time to read the village pumps. So in the past often only a very few number of users vote for policy changes and afterward there was a big outcry because of the changes. After we had put such things on our central notice the participation on discussion and vote had increase tremendously. By admin vote or policy vote often more than 50 users would take part on discussion and vote, instead of only a dozen.
Thus far my experience.
Greetings Ting
Am 19.05.2011 10:52, schrieb church.of.emacs.ml:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days.>99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method... [3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hi Tobias,
thank you for bringing this up. The thought had crossed my mind too.
I'm glad that the election banner seems to appear only when logged in - it is absolutely useless for people who only read articles, even for only 3 days.
More annoying was the POTY competition - this type of cross wiki advertising should not be done. What will we have next? The ad of the week for wikibooks, wikinews, wikiversity, spoken wikipedia? Where will it stop? If we have these, why not ads for specific projects like history or art or over all wikis?
For every message we should look for the most optimal way to communicate that message. An email or article in the signpost might be a much more cost effective way than a banner.
kind regards, Teun Spaans
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@ googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to the audience.
Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences (readers/authors are annoyed)?
Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on them [2].
I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner, whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3]) or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is everything fine the way it is?
Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
- Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images.
There are also specific CentralNotice features that would make it significantly less annoying, e.g. instant global dismiss. In general, if all you have is a hammer^Wbanner campaign management tool, everything looks like a banner campaign ...
It's clear that there's a need for community broadcasting tools that allow for a degree of personal flexibility, whether it's by means of subscription or otherwise. We see this need expressed again and again, and answered by bots, banners, or even manual talk page notifications to large numbers of users. As an alternative approach, Wikia implemented an extension that placed dismissible messages on top of the talk page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SiteWideMessages
Combined with tags/subscriptions, a similar approach could be very powerful.
I'm glad that we have CentralNotice -- it's become immensely flexible. But it's driven largely by the needs of the fundraiser and I hope that WMF will be able to invest in this toolset also from the point of view of community/chapter/WMF communication needs.
On 05/21/2011 02:12 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:
It's clear that there's a need for community broadcasting tools that allow for a degree of personal flexibility, whether it's by means of subscription or otherwise.
I agree, this would fix almost all problem instantly. Although it does not replace the general recommendation to keep annoyance (of banners or other means) to a minimum. :)
Are there any devs on your proposal? Or is development planned in this area? (If these are two noes, it might be an idea for WMDE's community project budget)
-- Tobias
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 2:48 AM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
Are there any devs on your proposal? Or is development planned in this area? (If these are two noes, it might be an idea for WMDE's community project budget)
I hope we can get some of the annoy-me-not stuff with CentralNotice fixed during the sprints leading up to the fundraiser, but beyond that, there's not yet a dedicated project to build better messaging/broadcasting tools. So if it's a possibility for WMDE (or another chapter/group/individual) to take this on, that would be great.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org