[Wikimedia-l] Overloaded with CentralNotices

Tue Oct 29 22:35:06 UTC 2013

Hi Romaine,

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On the Dutch Wikipedia users have indicated that they perceive the number of Global Notices too much and the more that happens the more users will start to add code to their preferences to fully block every notice as they are so tired of them.
>
> The current load of negative feedback about the banners is currently coming up after the especially the FDC banners

I assume that by "current load of negative feedback", you mean the
comments by Grashoofd and Saschaporsche in this discussion?
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:De_kroeg#Wikimedia_Spam
Thank you for resolving some misconceptions there (e.g. the assumption
that these banners were shown to all Dutch Wikipedia readers  - they
are set to be displayed to logged-in users only); I also responded to
some other points in that thread.

About the FDC banners in general:

The FDC - itself consisting of volunteer community members - considers
it really important that the editing community gets to have a say in
the process of how donation money is allocated to various Wikimedia
organizations in the FDC process. See e.g. their recent blog post at
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/25/call-for-community-input-funding-proposals-11-wikimedia-organisations/
(as mentioned there, this time the decisions are particularly
difficult, as the amount requested in this round is already close to
what's available for the whole year including next round's requests,
$6 million). Without the work of the editing community, this money
would not be available. Even if admittedly many editors are either not
interested in participating in discussions on how to spend it, or do
not have the time, I think it's still important to widely inform the
community of this possibility.

CentralNotice banners are currently the most effective way of making
community members aware of this opportunity to influence the process,
which happens twice a year (once a year if you only consider a
particular organization/country), and is closing soon for this round.
The country-specific FDC banners invite editors to comment
specifically on the funding request from an organization in that
country (Wikimedia Nederland in this case), which is assumed to be
particularly relevant for them, as the majority of the planned
spending in each proposal tends to be for activities supporting
precisely this local editing community.

>
> Every week a new notice is considered too much.

I assume that "every week" is a rhetorical expression. However, it's
true that this month there have been three campaigns specific to the
Dutch Wikipedia/the Netherlands.  Curiously, you are omitting the fact
that it was yourself who ran two of them:

"WMNL-register-WCN-2013" (inviting registration for the
Wikiconferentie) - run on "high" priority for both logged-in and
anonymous users, for 17 days in two countries

"WMNL-edit-a-thon-DenHaag"  (inviting participation in an edit-a-thon)
 - run on "high" priority for both logged-in and anonymous users, for
two days in one country

In comparison, the above mentioned FDC community review invitations
run on "normal" priority and only for logged-in users, i.e. get vastly
less exposure than these two event invitations. And I would argue that
the number of users who are able to follow the invitation to
participate in an online activity (like commenting on a wiki page in
case of the FDC, or uploading images in case of WLM) is much higher
than the number of users who are able to travel and spend the time to
attend a physical event in a particular location. I'm not opposed to
the use of CentralNotice to promote a nationwide annual conference.
However, if one is concerned about banner blindness and worried that
users are "overloaded with CentralNotices", it's probably worth asking
the question if a single editathon in one city needs to be advertised
with "high" priority countrywide banners to anonymous users. The
English Wikipedia tends to use geotargeted watchlist notices for that
kind of announcement instead
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice ).

>
> I already noticed earlier that there is also some kind of banner blindness for many users: they get a banner on pages but do not look at them any more just as it are adds.
>
That's indeed something to be concerned about, and it's one reason for
adding upcoming banner campaigns to the public planning page at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar , to facilitate
coordination and discussion. It seems that this wasn't done for the
above mentioned editathon banners. The current FDC banners have been
announced there since October 1, and while I am taking the criticism
that you are mentioning serious, I would also like to note that it is
the first such criticism about them that is coming to my attention.

> This time several users got a notice in English what was perceived disturbing.
>
All the FDC banners contain a link inviting to add missing
translations (the global banner has been translated into >70
languages), but at least for major languages like Dutch, the intention
is indeed to get them translated before they go live. As you said
yourself on the De Kroeg, this banner was available in Dutch when it
came live yesterday.

> Also they experience getting banners as not interesting for Wikipedia.
>
> As bonus I personally and other users have experienced that clicking away a banner made the banner appear again within the hour visiting other pages. I had that at least four times on a project, on several projects. Re-appeasring after being clicked away is useless and disturbing.

Yes, that should not happen. The banners rely on a cookie to store
this user choice. A possible reason could be that the cookie got lost
e.g. when the browser was restarted, or it might be a bug.

>
> Also it is annoying that I need to click the same banners away on each project I visit, many users visit Wikipedia, but also work on Commons, Wikidata, etc.
>
I agree, that's something worth looking into - I assume it would need
additional technical work.
>
> I think the the CentralNotice should be redesigned or the CentralNotice will loose it effectiveness. Something is really going wrong.
>
>
> Romaine
>
> (tech ambassador for nl Wikipedia)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB