[Foundation-l] Meta goings on

[Anthere]

I have been trying to think about the past days issues.
Fuzheado and others mentionned the goings-on as the place they go to when they want to be kept updated.
I was glad to hear that, because I had the feeling this page was not very much used. If it is, then it is worth :-)
 
I'll revive a discussion we had with Erik and Mav on this goings-on issue, related to the "news" issue.
 
The "news" is the place where we keep track of relevant events in a chronological manner. Typically, we find news such as
- xx.wikipedia reached 10000 articles
- zz.wiktionary switched to utf today
- there was a meeting in city tt today
- we received the prize pp
- download time planned today
 
Currently, these news are very short (not detailed) with links. The audience is "contributors" and "people outside the project".
The display is actually a sort of a weblog. 
Basically, it is not translated, but it is usually written in simple english.
 
 
The "goings-on" is the place where we mention events or discussions. This is a lot "internal kitchen" which imho is none of the business of external readers.
The information is first sorted by "type", then a little bit by "date".
We had hoped that the information would be translated on local goings-on, but it is just not done, even on big wikipedias such as the english one.
There is no easy navigation between languages.
The information is not as short as on the "news". Often, a short summary explains the issue itself. It is not always written in simple english.
 
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My questions
 
Do you think the "news" and the "goings-on" should merged ? Or that one should be made the subset of the other ?
How do we manage the overlap of information ?
 
It seems to me that the current goings-on subsections are a bit confusing. I often hesitate between 2 sections when I want to add an information.
Should we keep the "by topic" classification ? Or switch to another type of classification ? If we do keep "by topic", should we keep the current classification or is there a better proposal ?
 
Should we try to identify timeline better ? Either by organising goings-on according to "date of addition" or introducing more date references in the "by topic" sections ?
 
How could we advertise goings-on better so that people not only think of reading it, but also to update it ? I think it is very important that we do not have to write dozen of times the same information in several places. This is a total loss of time and energy. 
 
Translation is basically non existent. We have three options
1) We do not even try to translate and we try to keep to simple english -> It think this is not a good move
2) We have an english version on meta, and translations on local project -> We tried that for 6 months, obviously it does not work
3) We have all translations on meta -> Translation requests page on meta seems to be working quite well now. What would you think of trying goings-on translation and giving up local translation entirely ?
 
If translations are done on meta, how could we better advertise meta goings-on on each local project ? How to tell those new ones that there is another life beside local project and that they are welcome to join ? Links in welcome messages ? Improvement in the recent changes editorial sections ? Promoting adding links in local pumps ? In news ? Adding a link in the menu bar ?
 
All this would be much easier if meta was more multilingual, with language preference for menu, and easier navigation between languages (rather than awkard templates). There were discussions about doing this in the software ? Is there any news of this ? Is someone interested in doing it ? If so, when can we have hope ?
Errrr... what would motivate the developper to do so ?
 
Who can help improving all this ?
 
May I have chocolate ice-cream on top ?


		
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