Hi Fire, thanks for posting about this.
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 16:48:23 +0200, Ronny Raschkowan ronny@kopfrechnung.de wrote:
Hello!
When i talked yesterday on IRC with another wikipedian, we had both the same opinion that there's a problem with the communication, and staying
< up-to-date... (high priority?) news concerning Wikimedia.
It /is/ sometimes hard to track high-priority news and changes, including changes in where devs/editors hang out, how to get things done, and how to be most effective as a contributor.
Another problem is, that Wikis also couldn't know where they have to do requests like: Request for Permission, for switching the logo path, for queries, for updating a LanguageXX.php. Possibly they don't know there are IRC Channels and Mailing Lists, too.
Or, even if they know they exist, they don't know how important these channels are.
As for your suggestions:
1) Announcement mailing list
We should definitely set up / reactivate an announcement mailing list that is read-only (restricted posting; one could suggest items for the next announcement, but couldn't respond to an announcement via the same list.) and low-traffic (one or two announcements a week, save for rare circumstances). I want to be able to subscribe to a list that I automatically flag as 'urgent' when new mail comes in.
2) A special page for coordination & communication
This sound as though it would make a better meta: page, with translations into many languages, than a Special: page on each wiki. I think such a page should link to each of the tasks one can accomplish on Meta: and IRC and mailing lists... and then link to something like [[m:All Wikimedia projects]].
[[m:All Wikimedia projects]] would in turn contain the kind of information currently on [[m:Wikipedia languages]] and [[m:Embassy]] and [[m:Administrators of various Wikipedias]], in tabular form. This extended project-list would include links to the main community pages, and the active contacts, for each local project. Elian has been talking about what such a page might look like...
3) Announcement translation and multilingualism
Let's say there are X languages interested in keeping up with/translating all announcements, perhaps having their own language-specific mailing list.
Instead of setting up announcement mailing lists in every language, which might involve delays for a moderated list, how about having very brief announcement emails, with a minimal bit of text and a link to a multilingual announcement page on meta:; the blurb would be translated into all X langs in the email (and if translators for one of those langs were unavailable for an urgent announcement, every interested recipient would at least know right away that something was going on).
The [[m:Announcements]] page could just be a reverse-chronological list of new announcements, translated into as many languages as possible (more than just X; contributors in other langs would more sporadically come and translate the page).
Discussions of new proposed announcements, and translations of the email blurbs, could take place on [[m:Talk:Announcements]], where some community consensus could be reached before adding non-urgent announcements to the list.
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