[Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-ambassadors] Overloaded with CentralNotices

[Tilman Bayer]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Konstantinos Stampoulis
<geraki at geraki.gr> wrote:
> 2013/10/29 Dan Garry <dgarry at wikimedia.org>
>>
>> How would you suggest we tackle this problem?
>>
>
> Echo can be a good alternative.
> Imagine a new notification for every user, a "global notice" (not a talk
> page message)
> This can be sent to registered users, with its own icon, a notification
> message with text simillar to what it would be included in a banner, and
> linking to the relevant page (instead of own talk page etc).
> So, every user will get it only once, but he can go back to it by clicking
> the notifications icon.
>
> mockup: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Echo-centralnotice.png
>

Yes, that could be a great idea, in particular when combined with some
kind of topic-specific opt-in and opt-out.

There has been quite a bit of thinking about technical solutions to
this kind of problem, including hope that Echo and/or Flow could play
a role in them. See e.g. the material at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Movement_broadcasting , in particular
the linked Wikimania presentations from this year (by Andrew Gray) and
last year (by myself).


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