On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Sage Ross<ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One of the great frustrations of Wikinews for me is
that it doesn't
have a system for identifying and pointing users toward opportunities
to get out into the offline world and do original reporting. A
fine-grained cross-project opt-in geonotice system could be a
solution.
Here's how I imagine it working: there is a new opt-in geonotice (in
addition to the current one that reaches everyone in the specified
geography). For the opt-in geonotice (which would hopefully be able
to reach across projects, since many causal Wikinewsies visit that
site only rarely) any trusted user could add new items to let nearby
people know about reporting or photography opportunities. For these
opt-in notices, we would not need to lock down the ability to add
items like we do for the current geonotice system (it's a fully
protected page), since people who opt-in will expect a bit a noise.
I think this would be awesome to try out! Geonotices have proved to be
wonderful for helping out with local meetups; I can even imagine
having two filters, opt-into notifications for local events and
opt-into notifications for wikinews stuff. Both pages to set the
notifications could be unprotected, and we could just see how it went.
That is all :)
phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at>
gmail.com *