[Foundation-l] Sitenotice use for Wikimania

Sun Jun 18 18:17:40 UTC 2006

--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net>
wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
> 
> >As announced earlier, the Communications committee
> is coordinating the 
> >use of the site-wide notices on Wikimedia
> Foundation sites. Right now, 
> >we need to call attention to Wikimania and
> encourage people to register, 
> >so starting sometime tomorrow we will be putting up
> a brief project-wide 
> >notice about this. We expect the notice to run for
> about a week.
> >
> >When this use of the site notice ends it should be
> blanked again (except 
> >for any separate notices to anonymous users being
> used for fundraising). 
> >We don't want these to be overused, so an extended
> silent period for the 
> >site notice should follow. After that, the next use
> will probably be for 
> >the fundraiser, assuming that committee is
> organized and a date settled on.
> >
> >--Michael Snow
> >  
> >
> Does this mean that project admins can't use the
> site-wide notices for 
> internal use, such as major policy changes or
> bureaucrat elections?  I 
> fail to see why (provided that other admins are in
> agreement that the 
> notice should go up) a project like ru.wikibooks
> needs to get special 
> permission from the WMF in order to use this
> function.

I know Wikisource has done this for various messages
of short duration.  Any admin can edit the Site notice
for the subdomain without needing specail permission. 
It is not really a global notice technically speaking.
 The history at en.WS shows despite the Fund drive
officially ending Jan 5, the progress bar remained on
the site notice till a local admin removed it on Jan
12.  Since then it has been used to advertise a few
important votes and alert people of multi-step bot
maintaince activity that they might have "corrected"
if unaware.  I would like to know if there is a real
overuse of this feature anywhere or just a
hypothectical concern.  Not that concern is a bad
thing, we should certainly discuss some best practices
with regards to using this.

Birgitte SB

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