I know not who had the idea of goings-on, but I think that is a *brillant* idea.
Announcements are far too formal. Pumps are totally clogged. Goings-on is a great way to have information made quickly available.
I made one quick goings-on fr a few days ago, in the hope it would relieve our pump. Our pump is so bad, that some people think we should double it with a board. That is a very bad suggestion. You do not make information flow by adding a parallel tube, you make if flow by redirecting the good information to the good people. So the solution is not two pumps, but better structure of the current information network.
Today, I realise that the goings-on could be one of this great solution for easy communication between wikipedias. And especially for wikipedias to know what is going on in the wikimedia community (as all these votes on meta, by laws topic, changes in software).
That is the ring we have been looking for for some time now ! :-)
Each of these goings-on should have one version on each wikipedia, and one central one on meta. In small wikipedias, perhaps there should be a link to the meta one for a while (as long as the community is not big enough to assume updates).
Each should have local community stuff, and wikipedia wide stuff. With the archives, that is the best way we can keep track of information, and make it flows in many directions.
I would dare to suggest that on each pedia, the issues that are wikipedia-wide are visibly separated from issues wikipedia-local, so update from one ring to the other is much easier.
It could be typically the job of an ambassador to update the local or the meta goings-on.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goings-on
What do you think ?
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Anthere Anthere wrote:
I know not who had the idea of goings-on, but I think that is a *brillant* idea.
Announcements are far too formal. Pumps are totally clogged. Goings-on is a great way to have information made quickly available.
[cut]
If this is only about "goings-on" for one, local Wikipedia, this can work. But not a global wikipedia "going-on".
To make this work you need a highly developed respected procedural structure for spreading information across all Wikipedias and languages. And time also for the migration of the information and feedback. There is no hope for this in the current organisation structure.
It may be possible for creating an internal monthly Wikimedia newsletter. For reporting the news of changes to the software, organisation or whatever news that can be nice to know for all users of the WikiMedia projects. Possible, not easy.
Walter
On Mar 26, 2004, at 16:06, Walter Vermeir wrote:
If this is only about "goings-on" for one, local Wikipedia, this can work. But not a global wikipedia "going-on".
To make this work you need a highly developed respected procedural structure for spreading information across all Wikipedias and languages. And time also for the migration of the information and feedback. There is no hope for this in the current organisation structure.
That's pretty much what the "embassy" pages were intended to do, but unfortunately it takes a lot of dedication to keep up such pages, and we're all so busy doing all the other things we're here
It may be possible for creating an internal monthly Wikimedia newsletter. For reporting the news of changes to the software, organisation or whatever news that can be nice to know for all users of the WikiMedia projects. Possible, not easy.
A number of large free software projects have weekly summaries of the development mailing lists, which may serve as a useful example: * http://winehq.com/?issue=216 * http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/latest.html
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Anthere Anthere wrote:
I know not who had the idea of goings-on, but I think that is a *brillant* idea.
I'm very glad that you like it. :-)
The following snippets are taken from a chat log of the evening of Sat 6 March, times are in UTC. I believe the idea was originally Pilaf's:
[23:35] <Pilaf> Is there anything like a "weekly digest" in en:?
but people originally misunderstood his vision:
[23:35] <AdamBishop> current events?
but I didn't ;-)
[23:41] <Timwi> No, such a thing does not exist to my knowlege. [...] [23:43] <SethIlys> Pilaf: What would go there? [23:44] <Timwi> I assume just about everything that has some sort of impact on the community of Wikipedians. [23:44] <Pilaf> Important and not so important announcements, important discussions going on, new "featured articles", statistics, etc. [23:44] <Timwi> Probably things like the VfD redesign (even if unsuccessful), the addition of new features to the software, etc. [23:44] <Pilaf> Timwi resumes it quite well :)
After a bit of organisatorial pain...
[23:52] <Timwi> Argh.
... as well as some contructive discussion ...
[23:52] <Timwi> I fear that mediation/arbitration info would drown all the rest of the information... [23:52] <SethIlys> Oh, I doubt it...
... the decision was finally made:
[23:53] <Timwi> OK, I'll start such a page. [23:53] <Pilaf> I'll help you if you let me :)
Quick decision upon the name:
[23:53] <Pilaf> What will it be called? [23:54] <Timwi> Since we've already had confusion problems with "Main Page"/"Wikipedia:Main Page", I'll call it "Wikipedia:Recent happenings" rather than "Wikipedia:Current events". Is that OK? [23:54] <Angela> not happenings [23:54] <SethIlys> [[Wikipedia:Goings-on]] ? [23:54] <Timwi> Goings-on is very nice!
and later, lo and behold:
[00:03] <Timwi> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Goings-on [00:04] <Timwi> It does help that it's Sunday 0:00 UTC just now! :-D
The first version of the page which I demonstrated here is now at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Goings-on/March_7%2C_20... and it already contained the first going-on! :-)
SethIlys and Fabiform kindly helped me collect the goings-on from the week that had just passed and ended up creating the page that is now [[Wikipedia:Goings-on/February 29, 2004]].
End of history lesson! :)
Timwi
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