[Wikipedia-l] Communication, being up-to-date and Mailing List issue

Fri Jul 23 21:35:10 UTC 2004

Hi Fire, thanks for posting about this.

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 16:48:23 +0200, Ronny Raschkowan
<ronny at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> When i talked yesterday on IRC with another wikipedian, we had both the
> same opinion that there's a problem with the communication, and staying
< up-to-date...  (high priority?) news concerning Wikimedia.

It /is/ sometimes hard to track high-priority news 
and changes, including changes in where devs/editors hang out, how to
get things
done, and how to be most effective as a contributor.

> Another problem is, that Wikis also couldn't know where they have to do
> requests like: Request for Permission, for switching the logo path, for
> queries, for updating a LanguageXX.php. Possibly they don't know there
> are IRC Channels and Mailing Lists, too. 

Or, even if they know they exist, they don't know how important these
channels are.

As for your suggestions: 

1) Announcement mailing list

We should definitely set up / reactivate an announcement mailing list that is 
read-only (restricted posting; one could suggest items for the next
announcement,
but couldn't respond to an announcement via the same list.) and low-traffic 
(one or two announcements a week, save for rare circumstances).  I want to
be able to subscribe to a list that I automatically flag as 'urgent' when new 
mail comes in.

2)  A special page for coordination & communication 

This sound as though it would make a better meta: page, with translations
into many languages, than a Special: page on each wiki.  I think such
a page should link to each of the tasks one can accomplish on Meta: and 
IRC and mailing lists... and then link to something like [[m:All
Wikimedia projects]].

[[m:All Wikimedia projects]] would in turn contain the kind of
information currently
on  [[m:Wikipedia languages]] and [[m:Embassy]] and [[m:Administrators
of various
Wikipedias]], in tabular form.  This extended project-list would
include links to the
main community pages, and the active contacts, for each local project.
 Elian has
been talking about what such a page might look like...

3) Announcement translation and multilingualism

Let's say there are X languages interested in keeping up with/translating all
announcements, perhaps having their own language-specific mailing list.

Instead of setting up announcement mailing lists in every language, which 
might involve delays for a moderated list, how about having very brief 
announcement emails, with a minimal bit of text and a link to a multilingual 
announcement page on meta:; the blurb would be translated into all X langs
in the email (and if translators for one of those langs were unavailable for an
urgent announcement, every interested recipient would at least know right
away that something was going on).

The [[m:Announcements]] page could just be a reverse-chronological list of new 
announcements, translated into as many languages as possible (more than
just X; contributors in other langs would more sporadically come and translate
the page).

Discussions of new proposed announcements, and translations of the email
blurbs, could take place on [[m:Talk:Announcements]], where some community 
consensus  could be reached before adding non-urgent announcements to 
the list. 

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+sj+