Hi,
On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 10:22 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
As it stands we don't really summarize changes very well, which is a prerequisite for telling people about changes. Occasionally changes make it to Tech/news, but that seems sporadic.
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I think the best way forward would be to more accurately describe upcoming changes on tech/news. Once we actually have a user-readable summary of actual changes that are happening, then we could have a more reasonable discussion about how to get the information into people who care's hands, without spamming people who don't. Of course maintaining tech/news would probably require more effort being put towards it then is currently done, which requires someone (or multiple someones) to actually do so.
Yep. Most of the limitations of Tech News stem from the fact that it's largely a one-man effort, which means (among other things) that things get missed.
As for the "accurate description" part, it's a difficult balance to strike between tech-savvy readers who would understand accurate (but complex terms), and readers without deep technical expertise who need things to be explained more simply (and maybe slightly inaccurately). On top of that, we also need to facilitate the work of translators by avoiding colloquialisms, etc.
I think the Tech news page makes it simple enough to get involved and contribute: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News#contribute ; We also have a reasonably-stable schedule, so now we "just" need more people to give a hand. I'm actually drafting an overview of how Tech news works behind the scenes; I'll share it on this list when it's out.
Developers would be ideally-placed to help identify noteworthy changes that will affect Wikimedia users, but most find that activity about as interesting as writing documentation, which says something :)
Earlier this year, in a discussion about Gerrit keywords, I suggested that we could use them to tag noteworthy changes, in order to make it easier for developers to identify noteworthy changes, while reducing overhead. Unfortunately, the discussion apparently died: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/68183/...
In the meantime, sending a short message to the wikitech-ambassadors list, or dumping a gerrit/bugzilla link at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Next is the best way to make sure something is communicated to Wikimedians who have subscribed to be informed of tech-related changes likely to affect them.
I have ideas on how to improve things in the long term, but I'm open to other suggestions to improve things in the shorter term as well.