[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 40, Issue 9

[Andrew Gray]

On 03/07/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:

> But I strongly disagree that e-mail is the only way this can be
> accomplished.  There are so many methods of doing mass communication to
> Wikipedia users that this is a complete fallacy that e-mail is the only
> solution.  As far as using [[Mediawiki:sitenotice]] and having that
> effectively work in all browsers, all skins, and get pressing messages
> out, that is something which should be taken to Tech-l or put on the
> MediaWiki-Bugzilla, with you adding your own vote to the bug if it is
> already submitted.  Spam is not the solution here.

The problem is, exhorting people to vote needs to:

a) be targeted to people *eligible* to vote; if undirected, it has to

   i) be clear to those who are eligible that they are
   ii) be clear to those who aren't that they aren't

and:

b) actually be clear why you ought to vote;

and:

c) actually get to the electorate

a) and b) together makes it very, very hard to efficiently condense a
"vote now!" message into a single sentence in the sitenotice,
regardless of whether or not that method can be coaxed into fulfilling
c).

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk