On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:35:42 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Again, we have grown too big to spend our time to go to each of the 50 projects in turn to ask people their opinion. This is just impossible.
Actually, it is only thirty times as hard as going to each of two projects to ask people their opinion... and doesn't require a Board member's attention. I don't think it is too much to ask that the 15 largest wiki communities have this kind of direct feedback about major announcements in their own language.
We have a number of translators in each language who would be happy to spend 5 minutes a week translating important notices for their local projects. What we don't have, is a page (one per language) dedicated to brief, globally-interesting announcements, where contributors are careful to write simply (for translation), and which is translated actively. See [[m:Announcements]] for a somewhat silly example. [Goings-on is many things to many people, but it is not this place.]
With such multilingual content, we could also generate an announcements mailing-list which would exist only to disseminate announcements, without the responses and emotional exchanges which keep many people from subscribing to current wikipedia lists.
Some time ago, I suggested that we have a system to publish an message on all wikipedia at the same time, precisely for these types of general message; it basically met no answer but one.
And this would be wonderful -- a small button on every logged-in page which lights up slightly when there is a new global announcement.