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[Teun Spaans]

How? - by a bot.

On the english wiki, I am a member of the Military history
WikiProject. There is a newsletter, which appears every monbth or two
months. All members are notified on their talk page. By a bot. Surely,
if a project can manage this, the core of wikimedia can mange this? I
admit, some volunteers are needed to do this.

Yes, the language is a problem. At the moment I see no alternative to
English. Translation by babelfish gives terrible results. At least at
start, there wont be volunteers able to translate it. You are right
that the next complaint will be that the message is in english. When
we have taken this step, and the complaint comes, we can invite them
to translate it.

One of the problems with the current communication is that we rely a
lot on "pull", not on "push". The information is posted somewhere, and
it is left to the wikipedians to visiti these places frequently and
read it. It is up to the wikipedians to discover these places. It is
up to the wikipedians to go to these places frequently. It is up to
the wikipedians to read them It is up to the wikipedians to act on it.
This holds true for communication from the foundation. This is true
for information from the local chapters. This is true for information
from commons, such as deletions. It is true for policy changes on
commons.

There is no information brought to the door. I think it might be time
to change all this. We might start about thinking delivering selected
information to the people on their talk pages. information in the
village pumps.

I dont say we should communicate everything to everyone, but we may
start thinking about such a change in our communication strategy.

We are already communicating to the outside world based on "push".
When the english wiki reaches it n-th million article, whap, out goes
a press release. The same for commons: when the 1 million images
milestone was reached. We dont wait till the media visit our sites to
discover it, we go out and tell them.
It wouldnt be bad when we followed the same line internally.

teun

On 12/30/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Perhaps a bot posting sensitive messages into every village pump, simply in
> > english, would be a solution.
>
> How? It would work somewhere. It wouldn't work in other places. If we
> care the entire community, it is not the way we are going to,
> regretfully I admit that is roughly what we are doing though.
> Principally I have find no difference between communications via
> sitenotice and ones via VP.
>
> On non-English projects, speically non Indo-European language
> projects, I have seen some (important to some extent) messages posted
> in English and left without comment. In this way the possiblity of
> translation doesn't depend on its importance but genuinly availability
> of volunteering translators. The next possible complaint would be "why
> it came in English but not in our language?"
>
> --
> KIZU Naoko
>   Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
>   * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *
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