[Foundation-l] CentralNotice use

[Erik Moeller]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml
<church.of.emacs.ml at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

There are also specific CentralNotice features that would make it
significantly less annoying, e.g. instant global dismiss. In general,
if all you have is a hammer^Wbanner campaign management tool,
everything looks like a banner campaign ...

It's clear that there's a need for community broadcasting tools that
allow for a degree of personal flexibility, whether it's by means of
subscription or otherwise. We see this need expressed again and again,
and answered by bots, banners, or even manual talk page notifications
to large numbers of users. As an alternative approach, Wikia
implemented an extension that placed dismissible messages on top of
the talk page:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SiteWideMessages

Combined with tags/subscriptions, a similar approach could be very powerful.

I'm glad that we have CentralNotice -- it's become immensely flexible.
But it's driven largely by the needs of the fundraiser and I hope that
WMF will be able to invest in this toolset also from the point of view
of community/chapter/WMF communication needs.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate