2012/8/23 Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 4:27 AM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2012/8/22 Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org:
On 08/21/2012 06:29 PM, Ryan Lane wrote:
When I'm doing an ops change that is user facing I write a blog post and I post something to wikitech-l. I don't bother using village pump. There's a reason for that. There's a *lot* of village pumps. Hundreds. In different languages. I can't possibly handle that many different conversations in that many languages. Even if I only post to 2-3 of them, I still have to have the same conversation over and over again with different sets of people.
We need a global system for communication for things like this. Everyone should be a part of a single communication thread about changes. All posts in the thread should be able to be translated in a crowd-sourced manner.
Just a quick note that the wikitech-ambassadors list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors is helping with this, and is going to be helping more -- I'll wait for Guillaume to lead the conversation about this, hopefully in the next 2 weeks.
You guys (and by that I mean "anybody who doesn't regularly edit a text-producing project[1], but needs to make announcements from time to time"; this includes most of the WMF employees) seem to have a problem with village pumps and instead invent all kind of alternative communication methods, like mailing lists, IRC meetings, Meta, WMF wiki etc., with the sole excuse being "they're hundreds of them".
Well, let me tell you in plain English with no regard to political correctness: your excuse sucks.
It sucks mainly because automation was invented half a century ago - I've said this here before and I'm saying it again: it takes at the very most 2 days to write and test a script that can post a message to any number of pages. There could be thousands of projects, the effort from the poster would be the same.
It also sucks because the vast majority of contributors don't know/don't want to use IRC, mailing list or even other wikis [2].
Yes, that's true, it has been a major learning for WMF in recent years that while all these (and also the Wikimedia blog) can be useful channels, many Wikipedians don't leave their home wikis and expect really important announcements to be delivered there in some form. In our Wikimania talk, MZMcBride and I gave an overview of the mechanisms that are currently available to do so.
Can you please point me to the location of the slides (if available)?
Those who know and want to use those alternative methods are discouraged by the scarce organization of the information.
Finally, it sucks because you basically expect people to look for your announcements and extract the information, when the whole idea of an announcement is to push the information from the originator to the receiver.
Sumana, my understanding of the "ambassador" concept is someone that takes the information from you and puts it on their home wiki(s). That's great, except it's unlikely you will find users from all the 200+ languages and even if you do, people quit, go on vacations etc., leading to information loss. An automated English message on the pump, translated on the spot would be much better.
Strainu
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery (a bot operated by MZMcBride) can do exactly that.
Great! What's the holdup to using it more?
It was used by the WMF engineering department to inform all of the projects about the IPv6 deployment in June (e.g. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Juin_2012#Update_on_IP... ), and all non-Wikipedia projects about changes they needed to make to their main page in order for it being displayed properly on mobile devices (e.g. https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/WikiWoordenboek:De_Kroeg/archief19#Mobile_vie... )
Hmmm, I remember the message, but I hadn't realized it was delivered by a bot at the time.
This still relies on local Wikimedians translating that village pump message into their language, many are doing so with those announcements. And, as Ryan says, it is difficult to follow up on discussions in all those (ca. 600) village pumps, so those messages need to point back to a central venue for feedback.
Agreed! Why not use a standard message for the feedback link, that could be translated once and reused?
And, this is obviously a channel which can only be used for announcements of some degree of importance. One might be tempted to create a separate "Wikitech ambassadors village pump" and have the bot post there.
I'm all in favor of "some importance" being less rather than more :) I don't think 10 or 15 messages per month would be considered too much, if the information is relevant to the project (i.e. don't send Wikisource-specific updates to Wikipedias)
But the new broadcasting functionality that is being developed as part of the Echo and Flow projects will offer a much better solution (basically, as user on a Wikimedia project you will be able to subscribe to receive notifications from information channels across projects, and I'm sure that one of these channels could offer such tech updates).
I don't know many details about those, but I do have 2 observations here. First, the fact that sometime in the future there will be a better solution should not stop us from implementing quicker fixes. Second, if there isn't a history of those somewhere easily reachable, people will quickly forget about notifications.
Strainu