[Foundation-l] Geonotice improvements that could make Wikinews great (among other benefits)

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Sage Ross<ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the great frustrations of Wikinews for me is that it doesn't
> have a system for identifying and pointing users toward opportunities
> to get out into the offline world and do original reporting.  A
> fine-grained cross-project opt-in geonotice system could be a
> solution.
>
> Here's how I imagine it working: there is a new opt-in geonotice (in
> addition to the current one that reaches everyone in the specified
> geography).  For the opt-in geonotice (which would hopefully be able
> to reach across projects, since many causal Wikinewsies visit that
> site only rarely) any trusted user could add new items to let nearby
> people know about reporting or photography opportunities.  For these
> opt-in notices, we would not need to lock down the ability to add
> items like we do for the current geonotice system (it's a fully
> protected page), since people who opt-in will expect a bit a noise.

I think this would be awesome to try out! Geonotices have proved to be
wonderful for helping out with local meetups; I can even imagine
having two filters, opt-into notifications for local events and
opt-into notifications for wikinews stuff. Both pages to set the
notifications could be unprotected, and we could just see how it went.

That is all :)
phoebe

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