On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:51:32 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Yes Bill, but... the whole issue is that it has to be quickly available for all projects ... ie, about 300 right now (okay, we could reduce this to perhaps 80 active ones perhaps).
We could still go for the low-hanging fruit and stick an "About this message" link on the most popular projects. That would eliminate a lot of the questions and complaints people have, I'd think.
If we have to create 80 pages for each language on each project, better just give up now. One person can't do it alone. He cant create 80 pages and cant create 80 translations alone in a couple of hours.
I know they're still not great, but has anyone looked at some of the automated translation tools for some of this? If the message is simple enough, the translations might not get TOO garbled. (Oh, who am I kidding? They stink. Right?)
The other point of my proposal is precisely to make it possible that information is available to all, without being necessarily displayed very visibly.
Maybe something in the top part of the page, where the username and such are displayed? An "announcements" link that changes color when there are new notices?
Or if it's something we want to make sure people don't miss, we could go the route of making a (shudder) "splash" page for the site, so that the very first thing visitors see is the donation message.
(As an aside, perhaps for a certain level of donation we could offer mugs or tote-bags with the Wikipedia logo on them? <smirk>)
Unfortunately yes, it requires development, so if no one is interested by doing it, it wont be done at all.
I'm going to be very happy to do development... once I familiarize myself with the code base. Now, if I just spent more time actually moving forward on that familiarization, rather than just talking about it... (...then I think my paying clients would probably be upset with me.)
Still, this is what machines, bots can do for us, replace humans for works which take too much time.
We were talking earlier about a custom bot interface on the website, but here's another thought: A separate, special "internal" bot mechanism whereby scripts can run directly on the server, available only for tasks that are *part* of the Wikipedia, rather than those having to do with articles themselves. The python bot code could probably be adapted for this purpose, and would provide a standard way of making server-side maintenance scripts.
-Bill Clark