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#Develo…
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_ambass…
) 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