[Foundation-l] CentralNotice use

[Orionist]

I thought these notices *are* displayed for logged-in users only, if they
aren't, then they should. At least the POTY notice doesn't show up for me
when I'm logged out.

I agree with you in regards to the use of images, and I think it should be
constrained to fundraising banners. "Size and intrusiveness" could
be proportional to the importance of the message, but the "notice" should be
"noticeable" as many editors just don't see it if it's too plain. However, I
think Thomas Morton's suggestion to tie the "hide" option to accounts
instead of cookies would solve that and most of the other concerns, since
the main annoyance seems to be that the banners keep
reappearing despite clicking the [x] over and over again.

The importance of such notices is that they give editors the chance to know
what's going on and take part in various community processes, which are
usually very hard to find and figure out, especially for those editors who
are working mainly on content, or haven'ts been around for years. So I think
there are huge positives there and they shouldn't be impacted if there
becomes a guideline.

Regards,
--
Orionist



On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 12:52 PM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@
googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed
> there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board
> elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to
> the audience.
>
>
> Take for example one of the most recent banners about candidate
> submissions for Wikimedia's Board Elections[1]. Until most recently, it
> has been displayed on every single page view for most of our 400 Million
> readers or so, according to the setup for 20 days. >99.9999% of our
> readers won't be candidates and for most of them, this is of no interest
> at all. Which is sad of course, we'd love to get more qualified and
> diverse candidates – that is to say, not only members of Wikimedia's
> core community. Nevertheless, the question remains: do the positive
> effects (chances on higher diversity) outweigh the negative consequences
> (readers/authors are annoyed)?
>
> Take another example: The call for votes on common's anual picture of
> the year competition has two very large banners with colorful images on
> them [2].
>
> I think, there has to be a serious consideration for each banner,
> whether its positive effects outweigh negative consequences. Most
> importantly, the fact that banners divert the readers attention and are
> therefor in most cases not in his direct interest, has to be considered.
>
> There are several ways of minimizing negative effects:
> 1. Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for
> information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc.
> 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only
> on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3])
> 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week)
> 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of
> colorful images.
>
> What do you think? Do we need to limit the use of CentralNotice through
> guidelines or introduce technical measurements (e.g. blank banners[3])
> or just appeal to meta admins to consider negative effects or is
> everything fine the way it is?
>
> Regards,
> Tobias / User:Church of emacs
>
> [1]
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=boardvotecandidates
> [2]
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&method=listNoticeDetail&notice=poty2010
> [3] Afaik changing weight alone only changes the distribution of
> banners. We'd have to add a "pseudo banner" which is completely empty
> and then give it some weight. Using that, we ensure that there isn't a
> banner on *every* page view, only on 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 or so.
>
>
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