[Wikimedia-l] Overloaded with CentralNotices

[Tilman Bayer]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 12:42 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj at alk.edu.pl> wrote:
> hi,
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 3:57 AM, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki at yahoo.com>
>  wrote:
>
>> The reason why I wrote is not to blame anyone, but to promote thinking of
>> other ways to communicate to the local communities.
>
>
>
> I'm skeptical, if a general banner is the best idea, too. Since quite
> likely only the more active WIkipedia users will comment on the FDC
> process, going to the Village Pump on local projects would be probably
> equally effective.

Yes, sending out messages to village pumps is an option that we
considered as well (using Global Message Delivery). However, based on
my experience there is no doubt that this would have been considerably
less effective.  There is a lot of active users who don't frequent
village pumps (or mailing lists) at all. To consider a concrete
example we may recall from the FDC's own history, the call for
volunteers that led to the formation of the initial committee was
first announced via a global message to village pumps in July 2012,
and then promoted with a CentralNotice banner (to logged-in users) in
August. In July it received 766 pageviews, in August it was 11,123.
(http://stats.grok.se/meta.m/201208/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Call_for_Volunteers
)

Of course it is to some degree a political decision how much normal
editors should be integrated into the decisionmaking process about
this donation money, and as such not mine to make. I do think that for
proposals that plan to spend money on supporting the local editing
community in their work, members of that community have special
expertise when it comes to assessing on how effective the planned
measures might be.

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