[Foundation-l] CentralNotice use

[Mono mium]

The POTY banner was announced on this list with no objections.



On Thursday, May 19, 2011, church.of.emacs.ml
<church.of.emacs.ml at 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.
>
>