[Translators-l] [Wikitech-ambassadors] Please help translate and distribute: New tech newsletter (2013, week 21)

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Guillaume Paumier, 24/05/2013 09:04:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
>>
>> Is it really effective to paste such huge amounts of (English) text and HTML
>> on village pumps etc.? Won't you just make people redirect the bot to a page
>> nobody looks at to get rid of it?
>
> The distribution list is opt-in,

Oh. Where/by whom was the it.quote village pump added?

> and the people who signed up did so
> after seeing the first edition, so I'm assuming they're fine with the
> English text and HTML.
>
> I thought about "just" posting a notification and linking back to the
> content on meta, but in my experience people prefer to get the content
> directly on their page (or e-mail) without having to do an extra
> click.
>
> That said, I still want to keep the text short, and to reduce the use of HTML.
>
>> Perhaps transclusion would work better, we used it in the past:
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_notifications
>
> Oh, this is interesting. I didn't know about this tool. Is it still maintained?

No, it's not been used for years, but the code should still be there.

>
> I'm not sure I understand yet how this system works. I think what we
> really want in the end is either cross-wiki notifications or
> cross-wiki transclusion.

It's very simple: text and its translations live on Meta and are sync'ed 
on templates (user subpages) on all projects, in the language of the 
project where available. When the text or translation is updated on 
Meta, the bot updates it on all wikis.
Each wiki can decide where to place the last "issue", just by 
transcluding the template where they prefer: this makes it easier for it 
to integrate with existing pages (which have higher visibility than new 
ones), including local bulletins and noticeboards but also user pages 
and whatever; this helps reaching the average editor, who doesn't read 
village pumps... especially when they are flooded.
Cross-wiki transclusion may happen in some decades, but this system 
worked well enough; its only problems were 1) difficulty of doing 
translations and hence limited language coverage, 2) low awareness and 
hence transclusion; a vicious circle that ended up killing it.

Nemo