[Foundation-l] How could information flow ?

Thu Jul 15 20:51:24 UTC 2004

Anthere wrote:
> 5. The message appeared everywhere in english, and people did not know how to have it translated

The message did have an [edit] link attached to it. Is there a way of
making this clearer? Perhaps just having the word "edit" in the target
language would help?

> 6. The message is not pretty (location in the page, red border, police size...)

This can be changed in [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]] but I expect many
people don't know that. Bill's suggestion of including a link to
"What's this announcement all about?" could address that issue and
explain how to reformat the message.

>>> 7. The message appears on every page (not enough discretion)
>> That's a ridiculous objection. The Wikipedia logo also appears on
every page. Current Events appears on every page.
> I agree. But still that is an objection which was made. And this is one of the reason why the message was removed from non en pedias.

I don't think that the notice appearing on every page had anything to
do with being removed from the non-English Wikipedias. It was removed
from them only for the reason that it was never supposed to be there
in the first place. Jimbo requested that it be put on the English
Wikipedia because of the expected increased in traffic from Slashdot.
As the Slashdot article was in English and linked only to the English
Wikipedia, the message was only required on the English Wikipedia. As
a result of trying to set up a system where the message would be
editable, it was accidentally placed on all Wikipedias, a situation
which was rectified as soon as Tim Starling was made aware of it.

Bill Clark wrote: 
> I know they're still not great, but has anyone looked at some of the automated translation tools for some of this?

There aren't free machine translators available for every language in
which we have a Wikipedia, and I fear it would look rather
unprofessional to have garbled semi-translated messages at the top of
every page.

Anthere wrote: 
> What I would like to see is something similar to the current "you have a message"...

I think this is a great idea, as long it is not abused by people
wanting to draw attention to some dispute or edit war they are in.

> Once the page is read, the warning message would disappear...

It wouldn't disappear for non-logged in users unless we want to start
sending them cookies.

Angela.