On the Dutch Wikipedia users have indicated that they perceive the number of Global Notices too much and the more that happens the more users will start to add code to their preferences to fully block every notice as they are so tired of them.
The current load of negative feedback about the banners is currently coming up after the especially the FDC banners
Every week a new notice is considered too much.
I already noticed earlier that there is also some kind of banner blindness for many users: they get a banner on pages but do not look at them any more just as it are adds.
This time several users got a notice in English what was perceived disturbing.
Also they experience getting banners as not interesting for Wikipedia.
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
I think the the CentralNotice should be redesigned or the CentralNotice will loose it effectiveness. Something is really going wrong.
Romaine
(tech ambassador for nl Wikipedia)
Hi Romaine,
Thanks for bringing this up.
On the one hand, the WMF often gets accused of failing to communicate properly and consistently with the Wikimedia community. On the other hand, when consistent communication is attempted though things like these notices, some people can get frustrated and tune out.
How would you suggest we tackle this problem? Simply not using these notices any more would lead to reducing our communication with the community, so without a better solution, we can't really disable the notices.
Thanks, Dan
On 29 October 2013 15:49, Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:
On the Dutch Wikipedia users have indicated that they perceive the number of Global Notices too much and the more that happens the more users will start to add code to their preferences to fully block every notice as they are so tired of them.
The current load of negative feedback about the banners is currently coming up after the especially the FDC banners
Every week a new notice is considered too much.
I already noticed earlier that there is also some kind of banner blindness for many users: they get a banner on pages but do not look at them any more just as it are adds.
This time several users got a notice in English what was perceived disturbing.
Also they experience getting banners as not interesting for Wikipedia.
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
I think the the CentralNotice should be redesigned or the CentralNotice will loose it effectiveness. Something is really going wrong.
Romaine
(tech ambassador for nl Wikipedia)
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Dan Garry, 29/10/2013 17:26:
How would you suggest we tackle this problem?
Ahem, I see several specific suggestions in the original post; my personal suggestion is to listen to suggestions. :) In particular:
On 29 October 2013 15:49, Romaine Wiki [...]
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Bug, known?
Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
Known bug; for registered users it's far from impossible to solve.
Nemo
Is it possible to put most notices on the community page for the community / set each account to follow the community page and let people know they can un-watch the community page?
more important notices can go wiki wide?
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Romaine,
Thanks for bringing this up.
On the one hand, the WMF often gets accused of failing to communicate properly and consistently with the Wikimedia community. On the other hand, when consistent communication is attempted though things like these notices, some people can get frustrated and tune out.
How would you suggest we tackle this problem? Simply not using these notices any more would lead to reducing our communication with the community, so without a better solution, we can't really disable the notices.
Thanks, Dan
On 29 October 2013 15:49, Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:
On the Dutch Wikipedia users have indicated that they perceive the number of Global Notices too much and the more that happens the more users will start to add code to their preferences to fully block every notice as they are so tired of them.
The current load of negative feedback about the banners is currently coming up after the especially the FDC banners
Every week a new notice is considered too much.
I already noticed earlier that there is also some kind of banner blindness for many users: they get a banner on pages but do not look at them any more just as it are adds.
This time several users got a notice in English what was perceived disturbing.
Also they experience getting banners as not interesting for Wikipedia.
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
I think the the CentralNotice should be redesigned or the CentralNotice will loose it effectiveness. Something is really going wrong.
Romaine
(tech ambassador for nl Wikipedia)
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
On 10/29/2013 12:26 PM, Dan Garry wrote:
Hi Romaine,
Thanks for bringing this up.
On the one hand, the WMF often gets accused of failing to communicate properly and consistently with the Wikimedia community. On the other hand, when consistent communication is attempted though things like these notices, some people can get frustrated and tune out.
This is a general issue, not in any way limited to Wikimedia. It's important to tell people relevant information, but not to flood them so they tune out or get annoyed.
There is no magic answer, it is just a question of carefully thinking, "Is this important enough to be at the top of everyone's screen?" before approving a CentralNotice. I don't think anyone is saying never use them.
If there were more easy-to-use opt-in notification mechanisms (e.g. Flow is considering (long-term) implementing newsletters), that would also help.
Reducing use of emergency notices (what Nemo mentioned) and allowing cross-wiki hiding (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16821) will of course go a ways towards reducing feelings of overload.
Matt Flaschen
Echo can be a good alternative. Imagine a new notification for every user, a "global notice" (not a talk page message) This can be sent to registered users, with its own icon, a notification message with text simillar to what it would be included in a banner, and linking to the relevant page (instead of own talk page etc). So, every user will get it only once, but he can go back to it by clicking the notifications icon.
mockup: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Echo-centralnotice.png
Konstantinos Stampoulis geraki@geraki.gr http://www.geraki.gr ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Οι παραπάνω απόψεις είναι προσωπικές και δεν εκφράζουν παρά μόνο εμένα. Το μήνυμα θεωρείται εμπιστευτικό μόνο εάν το έχω ζητήσει ρητά, διαφορετικά μπορείτε να το χρησιμοποιήσετε σε οποιαδήποτε δημόσια συζήτηση.
2013/10/29 Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org
Hi Romaine,
Thanks for bringing this up.
On the one hand, the WMF often gets accused of failing to communicate properly and consistently with the Wikimedia community. On the other hand, when consistent communication is attempted though things like these notices, some people can get frustrated and tune out.
How would you suggest we tackle this problem? Simply not using these notices any more would lead to reducing our communication with the community, so without a better solution, we can't really disable the notices.
Thanks, Dan
On 29 October 2013 15:49, Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:
On the Dutch Wikipedia users have indicated that they perceive the number of Global Notices too much and the more that happens the more users will start to add code to their preferences to fully block every notice as they are so tired of them.
The current load of negative feedback about the banners is currently coming up after the especially the FDC banners
Every week a new notice is considered too much.
I already noticed earlier that there is also some kind of banner blindness for many users: they get a banner on pages but do not look at them any more just as it are adds.
This time several users got a notice in English what was perceived disturbing.
Also they experience getting banners as not interesting for Wikipedia.
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
I think the the CentralNotice should be redesigned or the CentralNotice will loose it effectiveness. Something is really going wrong.
Romaine
(tech ambassador for nl Wikipedia)
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
On Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:49:52 +0100, Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Unless that's some new bug, it means that the notice was created as an "emergency" one and this can't be permanently dismissed. Why do we even have this kind if thing, I don't know, but we do and it's sometimes improperly used.
Hi Romaine,
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:
On the Dutch Wikipedia users have indicated that they perceive the number of Global Notices too much and the more that happens the more users will start to add code to their preferences to fully block every notice as they are so tired of them.
The current load of negative feedback about the banners is currently coming up after the especially the FDC banners
I assume that by "current load of negative feedback", you mean the comments by Grashoofd and Saschaporsche in this discussion? https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:De_kroeg#Wikimedia_Spam Thank you for resolving some misconceptions there (e.g. the assumption that these banners were shown to all Dutch Wikipedia readers - they are set to be displayed to logged-in users only); I also responded to some other points in that thread.
About the FDC banners in general:
The FDC - itself consisting of volunteer community members - considers it really important that the editing community gets to have a say in the process of how donation money is allocated to various Wikimedia organizations in the FDC process. See e.g. their recent blog post at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/25/call-for-community-input-funding-propo... (as mentioned there, this time the decisions are particularly difficult, as the amount requested in this round is already close to what's available for the whole year including next round's requests, $6 million). Without the work of the editing community, this money would not be available. Even if admittedly many editors are either not interested in participating in discussions on how to spend it, or do not have the time, I think it's still important to widely inform the community of this possibility.
CentralNotice banners are currently the most effective way of making community members aware of this opportunity to influence the process, which happens twice a year (once a year if you only consider a particular organization/country), and is closing soon for this round. The country-specific FDC banners invite editors to comment specifically on the funding request from an organization in that country (Wikimedia Nederland in this case), which is assumed to be particularly relevant for them, as the majority of the planned spending in each proposal tends to be for activities supporting precisely this local editing community.
Every week a new notice is considered too much.
I assume that "every week" is a rhetorical expression. However, it's true that this month there have been three campaigns specific to the Dutch Wikipedia/the Netherlands. Curiously, you are omitting the fact that it was yourself who ran two of them:
"WMNL-register-WCN-2013" (inviting registration for the Wikiconferentie) - run on "high" priority for both logged-in and anonymous users, for 17 days in two countries
"WMNL-edit-a-thon-DenHaag" (inviting participation in an edit-a-thon) - run on "high" priority for both logged-in and anonymous users, for two days in one country
In comparison, the above mentioned FDC community review invitations run on "normal" priority and only for logged-in users, i.e. get vastly less exposure than these two event invitations. And I would argue that the number of users who are able to follow the invitation to participate in an online activity (like commenting on a wiki page in case of the FDC, or uploading images in case of WLM) is much higher than the number of users who are able to travel and spend the time to attend a physical event in a particular location. I'm not opposed to the use of CentralNotice to promote a nationwide annual conference. However, if one is concerned about banner blindness and worried that users are "overloaded with CentralNotices", it's probably worth asking the question if a single editathon in one city needs to be advertised with "high" priority countrywide banners to anonymous users. The English Wikipedia tends to use geotargeted watchlist notices for that kind of announcement instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice ).
I already noticed earlier that there is also some kind of banner blindness for many users: they get a banner on pages but do not look at them any more just as it are adds.
That's indeed something to be concerned about, and it's one reason for adding upcoming banner campaigns to the public planning page at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar , to facilitate coordination and discussion. It seems that this wasn't done for the above mentioned editathon banners. The current FDC banners have been announced there since October 1, and while I am taking the criticism that you are mentioning serious, I would also like to note that it is the first such criticism about them that is coming to my attention.
This time several users got a notice in English what was perceived disturbing.
All the FDC banners contain a link inviting to add missing translations (the global banner has been translated into >70 languages), but at least for major languages like Dutch, the intention is indeed to get them translated before they go live. As you said yourself on the De Kroeg, this banner was available in Dutch when it came live yesterday.
Also they experience getting banners as not interesting for Wikipedia.
As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.
Yes, that should not happen. The banners rely on a cookie to store this user choice. A possible reason could be that the cookie got lost e.g. when the browser was restarted, or it might be a bug.
Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
I agree, that's something worth looking into - I assume it would need additional technical work.
I think the the CentralNotice should be redesigned or the CentralNotice will loose it effectiveness. Something is really going wrong.
Romaine
(tech ambassador for nl Wikipedia)
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Indeed, banners are not primarily intended to notify you; their intention is attention-grabbing and this is inappropriate for projects serving to increase knowledge, I believe. So for most applications, using CentralNotice is not legitimate usage of this tool, except Fundraising, which in turn should not distract logged-in users or anonymous editors. What we need is a way to let the user decide which information to obtain and, optionally in which fashion. Our primary question should be “How can we spread notifications to interested people most efficiently” and not “What type of web banner is more effective?” We are not here to annoy people, we are here to help them building educational content.
Let me focus on “the which” first: All kind of different interests are among Wikimedia users, some are interested in GLAM others focus on article work while a third group does administration work. Though CentralNotice can be targeted to specific projects, there is no way letting the user decide which kind of notice they would like to receive at which project. Therefore, I wrote an admittedly non-scalable system for Wikimedia Commons. It hasn’t been used frequently but gives the user the option to disable it completely (without ugly hacks), dismiss single messages (permanently, not using cookies at all) and to filter by topic and for the message creator various additional options. Try authoring a message yourself using the wizard [1] or read the docs [2]!
I’d like to summarize some aspects I would expect from a well-formed notification system: • Seamless integration with “Notifications aka. Echo” (or the watchlist). • Local project administrators should be able to push messages for their project. • The user should be able to decide about: o Where to be notified: I.e. -getting all messages for all projects at the same time -getting a banner or even a sound if there are new notifications o Topics to be notified about. o To not be notified about anything. o The geo-location the message is displayed for as this can’t be determined from IPv6 addresses. • The system supports proper i18n from the beginning on. • The system does not store cookies in the browser as a single solution for dismissing notices; instead it disables messages in server-side storage. Privacy settings, changing browsers or user profiles and virtual instances that are reset after shutting them down lead to the undesired result of getting a previously dismissed notice again. • Everything CentralNotice already has, including geo-targeting. Feel free extending this list.
As far as I know, there is also no analysis-tool for how CentralNotice is used. Imagine a timeline where the “campaigns” are drawn on as bars, optionally filtered by notice setting. This would at least allow us proving statements à la “Yes, CentralNotice and the need for communicating information through it became more important over the last 2 years”.
Since about 1 ½ years, I have blocked the CentralNotice completely using AdBlockPlus in Firefox due to all the annoyance. This allows me to block the nasty messages away on each wiki and also prevents that the “ad-content” is loaded, not just hidden. |https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:BannerRandom |https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecordImpression
The number of discussion- and notification-channels grows but I would personally prefer one well-formed channel. While writing the mailing list post, I know that only a fraction of people who are interested in it will read it and that under those who receive it, only some bother about it and more worse, that collaboration work using e-Mails is quite hard.
Time for a good central notification system for our own communication, I think.
Kind regards Rainer Rillke -------------------- just a Commons user
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Watchlist_messages/Wiza... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Watchlist_messages
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