[Foundation-l] Sitenotice use for Wikimania

Sun Jun 18 16:45:24 UTC 2006

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.

Yes, they shouldn't be overused, but at the same time this is something 
that can and should be under local project control.  

Widespread notices on mulitple sites is something that perhaps should 
get WMF coordination, but that is another issue entirely.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning