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's not an excuse. It's a problem to be solved. Let's discuss
solutions, rather than laying blame.
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.
Writing a bot that handles two way communication is not a simple
problem. Especially when you consider that talk pages can be formatted
in any way imaginable. Having an automated bot to post something is
perfectly fine if we want to talk /at/ the communities, but it's not a
solution if we want to talk /with/ the communities.
Also, when considering changes/features, it's important for each
community to understand the needs of other communities as well. I
think that's something that's completely ignored right now. Each
community only cares around their own needs. Developers need to
consider the needs of all of the communities, and in some cases need
to balance the needs of communities against each other. It's best if
all of the communities see the discussions and can be involved in a
project as a whole, rather than only their portion of the discussion.
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].
Those who know and want to use those alternative methods are
discouraged by the scarce organization of the information.
I don't think IRC or mailing lists are a good solution to the problem
either. A global discussion system is. We need to consider the current
situation, though. I think the ambassadors idea is a good interim
solution, even though it's a massive game of telephone that's very
likely to cause miscommunication and confusion:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tech/Ambassadors
This idea also doesn't let the communities be involved in the
discussion with other communities.
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.
This is my problem with a bot that pushes a message out too. It's not
two way communication. It's us sending a message out, then having no
way to have a discussion.
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.
If we can't crowdsource this, then it's never going to happen. This is
how our community scales. We have less people on the entire Wikimedia
staff than we have projects (by a very large number). We can't
possibly hire enough people to properly cover discussions in every
single project.
- Ryan