Hey folks, this is an occasional reminder about how to spread basic
information about technical changes to the Wikimedia communities. There are
enough new people coming into the Wikimedia technical spaces that I send
this out every now and then. If it's not relevant to you, or you know
everything about Tech News, you can stop reading now.
Tech News is the technical newsletter for the Wikimedia wikis. It’s not the
only way to reach our communities, and major projects will reach out in
many ways, but it is our main way of keeping them informed of changes big
and small.
Here is the latest issue of the newsletter:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2021/05
ABOUT TECH NEWS
a) What is Tech News?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News
Tech News is a newsletter for reaching out with technical updates to the
general Wikimedia editor communities, to make sure they can keep track of
what’s happening. Most items talk about changes from the Foundation, but
many items are about work done by volunteer developers or Wikimedia
Deutschland staff. It’s typically distributed in 18–24 languages, reaching
roughly 100 community pages (Village Pumps etc) in addition to those who
read it on Meta, see it included in the Signpost, get it in their email
inbox, or are among the 850 individual subscribers. Typically, this is how
we tell our editors we are changing or planning to change something.
b) How is Tech News written?
Simplification is key. Technical news for non-technical readers. Should be
easy to translate as well as be written with en-1 and en-2 readers in mind.
A couple of sentences per item, then a link to a Phabricator task, wiki
page or email if they need more information. Too long and we put an
unreasonable burden on the translators. This doesn’t mean you should avoid
adding things because all of this seems difficult – we’ll edit it, if
necessary. It’s a wiki, after all.
c) I’ve done something technical. The communities should know. How do I add
it?
Just add it. This is the best and simplest way.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Next will take you to the
relevant issue. Remember to link to a relevant Phabricator task, wiki page
or archived mailing list email.
(You can also add the “user-notice” tag in Phabricator together with a
simple 1–3 sentence explanation of what this is and how it affects editors.
Don’t worry about polish; we’ll take care of that. Or if you’re not sure if
it fits the newsletter – we’ll take a look, and if it doesn’t, we’ll just
remove the tag.)
d) When is it distributed?
Weekly, each Monday afternoon/evening UTC. The deadlines for additions are
several days prior to that to give the translators time to do their work.
See
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/For_contributors#When_is_the_work…
for when to add things to have them included in the next newsletter.
This is typically earlier than people tend to assume.
e) What is Tech News not?
* A general Wikimedia newsletter. Everything in the Wikimedia world is at
most one step removed from being technical. This doesn’t mean Tech News is
the best place. Typical items are new or upcoming features or potential
breaking changes.
* The way to reach the Wikimedia technical community. If you want to reach
Wikimedia developers, an email to wikitech-l is usually better than an item
in Tech News. Tech News is a way to keep Wikimedia contributors up-to-date
with technical changes.
* A way to talk about all the important things that happen in the
background. They’re often awesome and we should talk more about them, but
if they don’t affect how contributors interact with the sites, then this is
not the place.
* A place for updates about one wiki. If it’s just relevant for English or
German Wikipedia, you should inform English or German Wikipedia, not the
entire Wikimedia community. Exceptions to this rule are Commons and
Wikidata, because they’re used by so many other Wikimedia wikis.
More:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/For_contributors#What_is_typicall…
The best time to do this for minor things is typically the week they go
out, i.e. you add it by Thursday the week before the change we’re talking
about, which means it’s in the newsletter delivered on the Monday before
the train goes out Tuesday through Thursday, but anything major should
probably be flagged under “future news” much earlier – preferably while
it's still possible to act on relevant community feedback.
//Johan Jönsson
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