Topic on Project:Village Pump

At Talk:Code_of_Conduct/Draft#Wider_participation.2C_still there is a discussion about how to announce calls for feedback about the proposed Code of Conduct for technical spaces to mediawiki.org contributors. The idea of a watchlist notice has been suggested. As far as I am aware, we haven't used this feature in mw.o before. I guess this is a good place to ask for feedback about using this feature for this purpose.

Technically, this seems to be done by editing MediaWiki:Watchlist-details. Questions:

• Is this use of watchlist notice OK or not?
• Should we do it by editing MediaWiki:Watchlist-details or is there another way?
• Should we use plain text with links or i.e. a Template:Notice?
• How often and how long should these notices be kept, i.e. One week every time that there is a major call for feedback or more often?

Personally, I really dislike the abuse of that part of the interface for important messages, but I understand that some wikis think it's OK. We've never done it here, and I'd be sad to see it start.

More objectively, however, I also think it would be a waste of time for this wiki; very few people are active on MediaWiki.org in the way that editors of other wikis are, because a lot of the "action" occurs off-wiki, in tasks (Phabricator), in code (gerrit/GitHub/etc.), or for third party users of MediaWiki in particular, on their local systems, and so the use of the watchlist as the key place people see is not likely to work. The people who use their watchlists on this wiki (like me) are mostly wiki gnomes rather than the key people to involve. A logged-in-only sitenotice would probably have a much better effect at reaching the useful people for this work.

I have no objection to using a watchlist notice, though I agree with James a lot of contributors don't use the wiki that often, and probably use the watchlist even less. I also think the site notice is a good idea, but we probably want to limit it to text approvals (rather than "please help discuss this"). We don't want to be too intrusive, and the site notice appears on every page.

I personally find CentralNotice banners way more obtrusive than a one-line text on the sitenotice. CentralNotice banners appear for me several days on a week, with images, even if I dismiss them, while the sitenotice can be dismissed once and forever (until someone updates the sitenotice ID)

I propose to try something, be ready to pull back if there are justified complaints, and then fine tune next actions based on feedback.

A logged-in-only sitenotice looks like a good candidate for a first try, indeed. How is that requested and implemented? I propose to figure out these details and prepare a sitenotice for the approval of the Cases page, expected to start in a couple of weeks, after the call for feedback started yesterday by Matt has settled and remaining issues have been identified.

It may be just one week before starting the approval discussion, depending on how much feedback on Cases there is.

I agree a simple dismissable text sentence is fine. No need for an image.

The documentation is at Manual:Interface/Sitenotice , but I'm not entirely clear from that how it interacts with CentralNotice. Someone from Fundraising Tech probably knows.

@AGreen (WMF), how would we configure it if we want a dismissable text notice here and on wikitech.wikimedia.org?

Talked to @Awight (WMF) and @AGreen (WMF)

Looks like CentralNotice is the best option here. It doesn't yet support wikitech.wikimedia.org (phab:T147036), but I don't think that's a deal-breaker. I would guess most users of wikitech.wikimedia.org will either see it on MediaWiki.org or have heard about it already.

That will allow a banner that is:

• text (CentralNotice supports HTML, but a text-only HTML banner is not a problem)
• Logged-in only (just don't check "Anonymous users")
• Dismissable (need to add the "Close button" explicitly when drafting the banner, but then it will just work).

Awight said the SiteNotice would probably be problematic for caching. This looks to be the case. Not only does it show to anons (which we don't want), it will be cached for 30 days.

+1

@Seddon (WMF) @Qgil-WMF @AGreen (WMF) @Awight (WMF) Do you know who we can work with on this? I don't think I have the permissions to create a banner.

I saw meta:CentralNotice/Request , but it says it needs to be "10 days in advance of any campaign". We will have to update it frequently, and I would prefer not to have a 10-day lead time each time.

Sorry for the delay in replying!! Is it too late, or is this already solved? I think the 10-day lead time only refers to programming the campaign, not updating banners. Also, I suspect it's probably not that strict. :)

(I don't know)

This is in-progress. Thanks to the people who've helped, among others @JSutherland (WMF).

I actually saw the banner in Meta as well. Bug or feature? I actually think it cannot harm (really).

It was originally proposed as MediaWiki.org, we looked into MW.org + wikitech, there were technical difficulties with wikitech, so we ended up back at MW.org with no objections.

That's still the most appropriate audience.