[Foundation-l] CentralNotice use

[teun spaans]

Hi Tobias,

thank you for bringing this up. The thought had crossed my mind too.

I'm glad that the election banner seems to appear only when logged in - it
is absolutely useless for people who only read articles, even for only 3
days.

More annoying was the POTY competition - this type of cross wiki advertising
should not be done. What will we have next? The ad of the week for
wikibooks, wikinews, wikiversity, spoken wikipedia? Where will it stop? If
we have these, why not ads for specific projects like history or art or over
all wikis?

For every message we should look for the most optimal way to communicate
that message. An email or article in the signpost might be a much more cost
effective way than a banner.

kind regards,
Teun Spaans


On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:52 AM, 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
>
>
>
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