I suppose, that a way could be a warning, into centralSiteNotice or into another similar space, optionally shown by a gadget/a Preferences set (default=disabled) into any page of any wiki. This warning should be brief, informative and focused on possible unespected results by software changes.
"Normal" users shuold not view anything; advanced users (sysops and layman programmers) will surely appreciate it a lot. I remember terrible headaches trying to fix unexpented, intriguing local bugs of out rich javascript set of local tools into it.source.
Alex brollo
2012/8/24 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com
2012/8/24 Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com:
Your idea is a great one, except... I was going to say "you can't see the forest for the trees", but actually it's the other way around. I think you're too focused on the big picture (communicating with the community) to see that smaller steps can help a great deal.
I haven't seen any small step solution that improves the situation, though. Unless there's two way communication then it's the WMF telling people "here's what we're going to do" without any way for them to give us proper feedback. We can't possibly host discussions with all of our communities, and it's really unfair to only select the biggest ones.
That's exactly what I'm trying to point out to you: the WMF telling people "here's what we're going to do" *on their home wiki* IS a huge improvement. Specifically, on ro.wp, instead of 4-5 people seeing these messages, 50+ people would see the messages on the Village Pump. That's a ten-fold increase in coverage with very little effort.
Sure, it's great to have lots of peopled involved in the discussion leading to a big change, but it's not bad at all to have some people involved in the decision making, but _everybody_ in the loop about the decision taken. Think of it as law-making: some people gather, discuss and take a decision, which is then made public for all interested parties before it comes into force.
I really feel that the blog is the best place for announcements like this.
How many people read the blog? How many people combined read the village pumps of the 10 biggest wikipedias?
There's a number of decent ways to notify the community of changes. The blog is likely the easiest route for that.
No, it isn't. The blog simply does not have enough reach and very likely will never have enough reach no matter what you do to make it popular. I could find tens of other reasons why it's not the best method, but I'll stick to just one: bog posts are at least 2-3 times longer than messages on village pumps. This means 3 times more time to translate.
I think the author of the original article said it best: "Agreement aside, we're seeing a disconnect right now between what the Foundation is spending resources on and the issues faced by the community." If we can't agree on the problem, we will have a very hard time finding solutions.
Strainu
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