On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Sage Rossragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
One of the great frustrations of Wikinews for me is that it doesn't have a system for identifying and pointing users toward opportunities to get out into the offline world and do original reporting. A fine-grained cross-project opt-in geonotice system could be a solution.
Here's how I imagine it working: there is a new opt-in geonotice (in addition to the current one that reaches everyone in the specified geography). For the opt-in geonotice (which would hopefully be able to reach across projects, since many causal Wikinewsies visit that site only rarely) any trusted user could add new items to let nearby people know about reporting or photography opportunities. For these opt-in notices, we would not need to lock down the ability to add items like we do for the current geonotice system (it's a fully protected page), since people who opt-in will expect a bit a noise.
I think this would be awesome to try out! Geonotices have proved to be wonderful for helping out with local meetups; I can even imagine having two filters, opt-into notifications for local events and opt-into notifications for wikinews stuff. Both pages to set the notifications could be unprotected, and we could just see how it went.
That is all :) phoebe