On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 4:27 AM, Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2012/8/22 Sumana Harihareswara
<sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
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].
Yes,
that's true, it has been a major learning for WMF in recent years
that while all these (and also the Wikimedia blog) can be useful
channels, many Wikipedians don't leave their home wikis and expect
really important announcements to be delivered there in some form. In
our Wikimania talk, MZMcBride and I gave an overview of the mechanisms
that are currently available to do so.
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
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery (a bot
operated by MZMcBride) can do exactly that.
It was used by the WMF engineering department to inform all of the
projects about the IPv6 deployment in June (e.g.
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Juin_2012#Update_on_I…
), and all non-Wikipedia projects about changes they needed to make to
their main page in order for it being displayed properly on mobile
devices (e.g.
https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/WikiWoordenboek:De_Kroeg/archief19#Mobile_vi…
)
This still relies on local Wikimedians translating that village pump
message into their language, many are doing so with those
announcements. And, as Ryan says, it is difficult to follow up on
discussions in all those (ca. 600) village pumps, so those messages
need to point back to a central venue for feedback.
And, this is obviously a channel which can only be used for
announcements of some degree of importance. One might be tempted to
create a separate "Wikitech ambassadors village pump" and have the bot
post there. But the new broadcasting functionality that is being
developed as part of the Echo and Flow projects will offer a much
better solution (basically, as user on a Wikimedia project you will be
able to subscribe to receive notifications from information channels
across projects, and I'm sure that one of these channels could offer
such tech updates).
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB