In reading my quickly typed up email, I see I made several typos! If
anything is unclear I am happy to explain. Sorry; I guess relying on spell
checkers is not enough for me :)
On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 8:05 PM Huji Lee <huji.huji(a)gmail.com> wrote:
At fawiki, this was brought up multiple times. I think
there is interest
in incorporating it into the "In The News" section (although we have not
all the articles that enwiki has in that section. The idea of a site notice
that would appear on all pages was mentioned but some (including myself)
are against it. For one thing, site notices can be suppressed, and that can
reduce their effectiveness. For another, site notices are meant to be about
short-term wikimedia-only topics and using it for general informational
purposes is debatable (today we do it for a pandemic, tomorrow for an
election or political purpose? or fundraising for earthquake relief? it can
quickly bubble up or at least lead to lots of length discussions about
valid and invalid use cases; better disallow it outright)
Lastly, analysis of data from fawiki's main page (which gets ~50K views a
day) shows that taking something to the main page only increases its daily
page views by about a few hundred times a day. Those pages are topic of the
day (like COVID-19 pages right now) will get most of their viewership
through other mechanisms, mainly Google searches. To assume that
Wikipedia's "main page" is the starting page for a large group of users,
or
when they go to find new information, seems to be inaccurate. Spending time
on improving those articles and letting search engines guide the readers to
those articles seems to be a better use of time.
I realize my POV may not be popular. I feel like everyone wants to do
"something" right now, and putting stuff on the main page feels like a
thing that can be done and fulfill one's self of accomplishment. But
honestly, I think we're searching for the key where the light is.
Respectfully,
Huji
On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 6:06 PM Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <
nwilson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all.
A number of Wikipedias have either already created, or are discussing, a
more visible section on their Main Page to their local information about
COVID-19. Some have chosen to highlight a section in their existing "In The
News" equivalent or related ideas, some have chosen a sitenotice banner.
A few existing examples:
*
https://da.wikipedia.org
*
https://de.wikipedia.org/
*
https://en.wikipedia.org/
*
https://it.wikipedia.org/
*
https://ko.wikipedia.org/
*
https://nl.wikipedia.org/
Readers often turn to Wikipedia for neutral information in times of
stress, and I think it's great that some communities are actively assisting
like this. E.g. Enwiki is getting 900,000+ pageviews each day for their
main article this week.[1][2]
1) Question: Does your language community do something else/unique that
is worth sharing?
2) Suggestion: If not, you might like to start a discussion with your
community about adapting one of these ideas above, yourselves.
3) Reminder: Please let people know if there's anything we can do to
help, *particularly if your community is small* and doesn't have anyone
available who can easily change things like Main Page design aspects. You
can contact other editors for help at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech, or can contact the WMF Web team at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web.
Best wishes to you all,
--Quiddity
P.s. There are also some interesting notes being collated at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Coronation
and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/COVID-19
[1] [This should be all one link. It's just 10 examples out of the many
related articles.]
<
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=…
|Coronavirus_disease_2019|Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2|Social_distancing|Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic|COVID-19_testing|Coronavirus|2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_by_country_and_territory|Misinformation_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic|Xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic
<https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=this-year&pages=2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic%7CCoronavirus_disease_2019%7CSevere_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2%7CSocial_distancing%7CTimeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic%7CCOVID-19_testing%7CCoronavirus%7C2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_by_country_and_territory%7CMisinformation_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic%7CXenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic>
[2] See also
https://tools.wmflabs.org/langviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=…
for just one example article, across many languages, out of the
dozens-to-hundreds of related articles that many wikis already have.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list
Wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors