2012/8/22 Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org:
On 08/21/2012 06:29 PM, Ryan Lane wrote:
When I'm doing an ops change that is user facing I write a blog post and I post something to wikitech-l. I don't bother using village pump. There's a reason for that. There's a *lot* of village pumps. Hundreds. In different languages. I can't possibly handle that many different conversations in that many languages. Even if I only post to 2-3 of them, I still have to have the same conversation over and over again with different sets of people.
We need a global system for communication for things like this. Everyone should be a part of a single communication thread about changes. All posts in the thread should be able to be translated in a crowd-sourced manner.
Just a quick note that the wikitech-ambassadors list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors is helping with this, and is going to be helping more -- I'll wait for Guillaume to lead the conversation about this, hopefully in the next 2 weeks.
You guys (and by that I mean "anybody who doesn't regularly edit a text-producing project[1], but needs to make announcements from time to time"; this includes most of the WMF employees) seem to have a problem with village pumps and instead invent all kind of alternative communication methods, like mailing lists, IRC meetings, Meta, WMF wiki etc., with the sole excuse being "they're hundreds of them".
Well, let me tell you in plain English with no regard to political correctness: your excuse sucks.
It sucks mainly because automation was invented half a century ago - I've said this here before and I'm saying it again: it takes at the very most 2 days to write and test a script that can post a message to any number of pages. There could be thousands of projects, the effort from the poster would be the same.
It also sucks because the vast majority of contributors don't know/don't want to use IRC, mailing list or even other wikis [2]. Those who know and want to use those alternative methods are discouraged by the scarce organization of the information.
Finally, it sucks because you basically expect people to look for your announcements and extract the information, when the whole idea of an announcement is to push the information from the originator to the receiver.
Sumana, my understanding of the "ambassador" concept is someone that takes the information from you and puts it on their home wiki(s). That's great, except it's unlikely you will find users from all the 200+ languages and even if you do, people quit, go on vacations etc., leading to information loss. An automated English message on the pump, translated on the spot would be much better.
Strainu
[1] text-producing projects are all language versions of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiversity and Wikispecies [2] The Romanian community recently decided to lock the Romanian-language mailing list because of the many people that were not aware what a ML is and were replying to every email asking not to be contacted again.