[Translators-l] [Wmf-strategy-selection] Wikimedians

[Samuel Klein]

Philippe,

I know what you mean about posting to VPs being hard.  It need not be
so difficult, however. We've talked about setting up a global
announcement tool that would do the same.

Switching to a public forum: this seems like something to bring up on
the wikimediameta-l list (and perhaps the translation coordination)
list.  This is a specific, commonly requested, and rarely accomplished
task.  In effect:

1. define the ~500 wikis that are 'active' and that we'd like to send
messages to
2. define the Village Pump page or equivalent for every page.  So if
non exist, the main talk page; &c.
3. keep an announcement script running that uses a non-bot wiki user
to post updates to these. given an announcement title, it should
3a) know how to check to see if a short announcement with that title exists
3b) default to the closest parent language in a language tree if none exist
3c) auto-inlcude a backlink to a global discussion page (default: on Meta).
4. maintain a page describing this announcement bot, in core langauges.
4a) as part of this process, keep a list of stock phrases translated
into every language.  "announcement", "a discussion about <FOO> is
taking place on Meta", "Thank you, ~~~~", etc.

Is anyone working on something like this?  Could we implement
something like this before the next round of Strategic Planning
updates?  This seems like a year when we will need such an announce
feature - particularly in a fashion that encourages local community
discussion, something a sitenotice doesn't easily allow (it is
temporary and has no obvious talk page).

SJ


On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Philippe Beaudette
<pbeaudette at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The process is essentially the same as it would be for any
> translation.  The problem with VP's is posting.... blech.... it takes
> a lot of time for me to do it.  Pretty well kills a morning.  I have
> heard rumors of a bot that can do it, but haven't seen it yet.
>
> Philippe
>
>
> On Oct 1, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I'd be interested in leaving a personal message on the talk pages of
>>> the 1000 most active non-bot editors globally, intersected with the
>>> 10
>>> most active editors on each wiki, asking for their input in some way.
>>> These are people for whom the current projects are worth a good deal
>>> of interest and effort...
>>
>> There's no terrible rush for this - we could calculate who this would
>> be, post the list, and discuss the idea of leaving a brief one liner
>> and a link to a request-for-input.    We could probably centralize
>> this discussion on meta and link to it from the VP's of top projects.
>>
>> Speaking of which -- Philippe & Casey, is there a scripted process for
>> posting a brief message intended for VP's, ask for translations, and
>> then roll out the message as translations come in (with backlinks to a
>> unified discussion page on meta)?
>>
>> SJ
>>
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