Keeping up with everything at Wikipedia is a daunting task. In English, there are two medium to high traffic mailing lists (four for those interested in multi-lingual and technical issues), the announcements page, Meta-Wikipedia, and the uncounted issues being debated on Talk pages scattered about. And that's assuming you don't speak any other languages. Of course, if you're interested in what's happening on, say, the Spanish Wikipedia but *don't* speak Spanish, things become even more difficult. How can we make it easier to stay informed, especially for causal Wikipedians and interested observers?

I propose we take a cue from the Debian Project (http://www.debian.org/). It's a very complex project, with a myriad of mailing lists. For people who don't have time to eat, drink and breathe Debian, there's the Debian Weekly News, a weekly email newsletter that summarizes the major threads on the lists, announces new subprojects and software, and provides security update notices.

Debian Weekly News is run by one person, with occassional submissions from others. We can do better, using wiki collaboration. We could set up a page using a template on the meta. When people notice something of interest happening, they post a summary on the Wikipedia Weekly News page, along with links to where the action is (wiki page, mailing list thread, etc). On a given day and time, someone puts the text into an email, and sends it out over the new WWN-L mailing list. Then, the wiki page is archived, wiped, and the template is reposted, ready for next week's issue. Eventually, we could work up a script to automate the sending and archiving.

Ideally, we would have correspondents from each language with an active wiki. These correspondents could translate news from their wikis into English, and then translate the whole newsletter into their own languages. This would be a bit of work, but if there's enough interest, we could have several Wikipedia Weekly News lists, allowing people to keep up with project-wide news in their own languages. Also, representitives from wikitech-l would be good; they could summerize the tech discussions going on in layman's terms.

I've put up a page for working on this at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Weekly_News , as well a sample newsletter at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWN_sample (obviously I need a lot of help coming up with a workable template). If there's enough interest in getting this going, I think it would do much to improve communication through the project.

- Stephen G. ------- Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org