On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:51:32 +0200, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Yes Bill, but... the whole issue is that it has to be
quickly available
for all projects ... ie, about 300 right now (okay, we could reduce this
to perhaps 80 active ones perhaps).
We could still go for the low-hanging fruit and stick an "About this
message" link on the most popular projects. That would eliminate a
lot of the questions and complaints people have, I'd think.
If we have to create 80 pages for each language on
each project, better
just give up now. One person can't do it alone. He cant create 80 pages
and cant create 80 translations alone in a couple of hours.
I know they're still not great, but has anyone looked at some of the
automated translation tools for some of this? If the message is
simple enough, the translations might not get TOO garbled. (Oh, who
am I kidding? They stink. Right?)
The other point of my proposal is precisely to make it
possible that
information is available to all, without being necessarily displayed
very visibly.
Maybe something in the top part of the page, where the username and
such are displayed? An "announcements" link that changes color when
there are new notices?
Or if it's something we want to make sure people don't miss, we could
go the route of making a (shudder) "splash" page for the site, so that
the very first thing visitors see is the donation message.
(As an aside, perhaps for a certain level of donation we could offer
mugs or tote-bags with the Wikipedia logo on them? <smirk>)
Unfortunately yes, it requires development, so if no
one is interested
by doing it, it wont be done at all.
I'm going to be very happy to do development... once I familiarize
myself with the code base. Now, if I just spent more time actually
moving forward on that familiarization, rather than just talking about
it... (...then I think my paying clients would probably be upset with
me.)
Still, this is what machines, bots can do for us,
replace humans for
works which take too much time.
We were talking earlier about a custom bot interface on the website,
but here's another thought: A separate, special "internal" bot
mechanism whereby scripts can run directly on the server, available
only for tasks that are *part* of the Wikipedia, rather than those
having to do with articles themselves. The python bot code could
probably be adapted for this purpose, and would provide a standard way
of making server-side maintenance scripts.
-Bill Clark