Hi,
There's currently a proposal on the English Wikipedia about creating a "Developer's noticeboard" so that people can stay informed about technical announcements outside of the noisy Village Pump/Technical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#Develop...
The main argument (as I understand it) is that existing venues (like the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list, currently used for this purpose) don't meet the needs of users who want to be notified on their wiki, in their watchlist.
Rather than creating yet another (enwiki-only) venue for technical announcements, I'd prefer to find a way to use the current venues, and augment them to mitigate their limitations.
What I currently have in mind is a bot subscribed to the wikitech-ambassadors list, that would post every first message of a thread to the talk page of people who have signed up (like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambassa... ) or to a noticeboard (that would then be mostly automated).
The bot would create a new section, using the email's subject line as the section title, and its body as the message. It would ideally link back to the gmane archive for that thread, so that users can read follow-up messages there. Messages could be trimmed if they're too long. The system could possibly also be used for other mailing lists later.
My intuition is that this wouldn't be exceptionally hard to implement, but I'd like a more informed opinion. Does anyone have experience with a similar tool? Would someone be interested in giving it a try?
In the longer term, the Notifications system will hopefully end up solving the issue in a better way, but if a quick bot hack can be a good interim alternative, I think it's worth a shot.
-- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org