Hi,
On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 10:22 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)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.
<snip>
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.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation