[Commons-l] Automatic messages to users: guessing userpreferred language

[Alex Nordstrom]

Saturday, 6 October 2007, Florian Straub wrote:
> What about {{notify me}}? The users are advised to put it on their
> user page after registration.

What? We have a template encouraging this behaviour? English, Polish and 
Spanish Wikipedia are not Wikimedia Commons. Demanding that Commons 
discussions take place there is about as reasonable as asking 
notification on one's Facebook page. It's a long-standing principle on 
Wikimedia projects that discouraging use of one's talk page (and that 
includes diverting such use elsewhere) is unacceptable.

 * Users who can't be bothered to check their user talk pages should 
enable e-mail notifications. It takes all of three clicks.
 * Users who can't be bothered checking their user talk pages should not 
expect other users to jump through hoops such as registering on another 
site or divulging their IP address.

Apart from the rudeness of expecting this burden to be reversed, there 
are several technical problems with this idea.

 1. Users of UserMessages.js might not even see such notices, or would 
be slowed down in their janitorial tasks if they were to cater to them.
 2. There is no way of using Commons talk page templates outside of 
Commons, short of copying the wiki code, manually filling in the 
parameters, and modifying all the links.
 3. It increases the risk of users being impersonated and of inactive 
accounts being compromised.

The best course of action would be to have a bot inform users on the 
page they have requested that this is a bad idea and that they can 
easily enable e-mail notifications to achieve their objectives without 
any of the downsides. This should then be followed by the delinking and 
removal of the template.

I have previously discussed this matter at 
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2007Mar#Redirected_user_talk_pages] 
and 
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Talk_page_guidelines] 
and I will leave a copy of this message at 
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Notify_me].

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LX
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to commons-l.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/attachments/20071006/35fe5bef/attachment.pgp