[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Weekly News

[sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca]

Keeping up with everything at Wikipedia is a daunting task. In 
English, there are two medium to high traffic mailing lists (four for 
those interested in multi-lingual and technical issues), the 
announcements page, Meta-Wikipedia, and the uncounted issues 
being debated on Talk pages scattered about. And that's assuming 
you don't speak any other languages. Of course, if you're 
interested in what's happening on, say, the Spanish Wikipedia but 
*don't* speak Spanish, things become even more difficult. How can 
we make it easier to stay informed, especially for causal 
Wikipedians and interested observers?

I propose we take a cue from the Debian Project 
(http://www.debian.org/). It's a very complex project, with a myriad 
of mailing lists. For people who don't have time to eat, drink and 
breathe Debian, there's the Debian Weekly News, a weekly email 
newsletter that summarizes the major threads on the lists, 
announces new subprojects and software, and provides security 
update notices.

Debian Weekly News is run by one person, with occassional 
submissions from others. We can do better, using wiki 
collaboration. We could set up a page using a template on the 
meta. When people notice something of interest happening, they 
post a summary on the Wikipedia Weekly News page, along with 
links to where the action is (wiki page, mailing list thread, etc). On 
a given day and time, someone puts the text into an email, and 
sends it out over the new WWN-L mailing list. Then, the wiki page 
is archived, wiped, and the template is reposted, ready for next 
week's issue. Eventually, we could work up a script to automate 
the sending and archiving.

Ideally, we would have correspondents from each language with an 
active wiki. These correspondents could translate news from their 
wikis into English, and then translate the whole newsletter into 
their own languages. This would be a bit of work, but if there's 
enough interest, we could have several Wikipedia Weekly News 
lists, allowing people to keep up with project-wide news in their 
own languages. Also, representitives from wikitech-l would be 
good; they could summerize the tech discussions going on in 
layman's terms.

I've put up a page for working on this at 
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Weekly_News , as well a 
sample newsletter at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWN_sample 
(obviously I need a lot of help coming up with a workable template). 
If there's enough interest in getting this going, I think it would do 
much to improve communication through the project.

- Stephen G.
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Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org