I completely agree. That was the crux of my initial problem with Wikispecies - sure, most of us active users are on IRC and the mailing list. But as Sj says, those of us not in an appropriate timezone (such as me; I sleep when most of Wikimedian daily activity just starts) don't have as much a say, nor even much information on these things, especially with the IRC channel. As Sj has said, this isn't scaling. We need a centralised source for these without having to log on to meta everyday, read the mailing lists, and be present on two or three IRC channels.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]] on en.wikipedia.org)
Sj wrote:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:59:32 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
We will try to do better in the future, to listen more and longer. But I must warn you of one point. Jimbo, Angela and I are all three already streching our time limits. If you all want us to listen better, you will have to help us by providing better insight, summaries and such... and
One thing which I would very much like to see, is a group trusted to act as ombudsmen or secretaries, who stay on top of these issues of communication. These are not tangential issues which matter only to those who are complaining right now, they are central to scaling our community.
Many of the people most likely to be involved with important decisions have a hundred things to worry about, to draft, and to discuss. There should be a single sink into which they (and community members) can toss updates and announcements, confident that from there, such tidbits will be collated and distributed to every appropriate community channel.
- "I just created page <foo>on meta that everyone should know about,"
- "I created a meetup list on my user-talk page, and posted to
wikipedia-l about it,"
- "Jimbo just sent a notice about global problem <fee> to foundation-l,"
- "The Board just agreed that <fi> and said as much on the AC Talk page,"
- "There's a big debate about page-capitalization going on at page <fo>"
- "This group of users says nobody is paying attention to their
troubles with <fum>"
Currently, I feel that one has to read three+ mailing lists, watch new pages and RC on meta, and keep up with a sizeable watchlist on one's local wiki, to stay abreast of developments, or even to show up in time to have a say in certain important discussions.