Announcement Policies (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] New edit modus)

[Ulrich Fuchs]

>(he announced the new feature and asked 
>people to test it on the test wiki before it went live - wow, what a crime!). 

For me, he didn't announce it. The first notice I got from that new feature 
was from the posting here on the list. Then I was looking through the 
wikitech list, and found Eriks announcement there. But: That's the technical 
list, I don't read it normally. However, since we're talking about editing 
here, I'm interested in that information.

That brings me to this posting: Obviously, I don't notice if something of 
importance is going on. But that's not my fault, I just can't collect the 
information because it's to scattered among various lists, mediawiki pages, 
meta pages, IRC chats and so on. And I don't have time to read all of them.

So I'd like to suggest a general announcement policy: 

Everything that is of some importance to the Wikipedia community - like new 
software features, changes in the hardware status, disabling of features and 
so on, scheduled server downtimes - should be announced on THIS list (since 
the official announcement list is not used any more). Always. Please. I - and 
probably also most others - cannot be everywhere, but still like to know 
what's going on. In each announcement, a hint should be given where the 
respective discussion takes place, so that this discussion doesn't increase 
the traffic here.

Uli