Meta:Babel

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"Minor" project's Village Pumps are completely bloated with mass messages, leaving no room for project discussion[edit]

A comparison between the bloat of mass messages and actual project discussions.

I have the feeling that this is incrementally worse. Every team wants every message to be delivered to every project's chat. This mass messages creates 0 engagement, and it's causing actual discussions to be buried. Any thoughts? Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:28, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Ignacio Rodríguez projects can direct those things elsewhere if they want. They are almost always delivered to a list, so a project can make a special pump for "annoucements", or redirect things like technical notices to a technical pump (like how these 74 projects have a technical pump: wikidata:Q4582194). — xaosflux ^Talk 15:33, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Not every community, specially the smaller ones, has the knowledge or time to make those adjustments. There must be a better way instead of mindlessly flooding every pump with bloat Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 16:19, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm sensitive to this concern: in my previous role as a Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) facilitator, I sent out a fair number of these mass messages to the places listed at Distribution list/Global message delivery. I noticed they did tend to pile up on the venues, and did fear this might discourage local users from creating other threads (or drown out threads) specific to those projects with sheer volume. I'm wondering how you've reached the conclusion that they create zero engagement though. How can you be sure no one is reading, clicking through, engaging here on Meta-Wiki, signing up for the events, voting on the topics, etc.? As a counter-point: most of the messages sent by MSG invite readers with a link to translate the original message into their language ({{int:please-translate}}), and there are a non-zero number of additional translations later submitted as a result. To me, this is at least a minor indicator that engagement is being generated, even if there's not many responses made directly on the village pumps. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm sorry if I offended you. The 0 part is definitively an exaggeration. What I meant is that the "project village pump" purpose is to discuss issues pertaining the project, and the mass messages doesn't (mostly) contribute to that. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:31, 13 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No offense taken! I'm glad that folks are thinking about this. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 13 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I have become concerned about this as well (as I have found entire small projects missing from GMD and have been adding them). However I don't have any easy answers to offer. Certain things like elections and major policy changes need to be sent out. Perhaps we need to encourage more selective use of the GMD function, as well as some automated archiving of old messages. (Also see phab:T313672 which I suspect is related). --Rschen7754 18:05, 11 August 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I too feel like this is a problem. On Incubator I have created a separate page for such messages years ago, incubator:Incubator:Wikimedia news, distinct from the Community Portal which hosts discussions. I think this works well and I can only encourage every community that prefers to keep things separate to do so in this way. It's not like the global messages are irrelevant, just that local discussions tend to disappear, especially when they are "low volume" due to the community being small. --MF-W 14:36, 1 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Comment If anyone is interested: we have decided to move all global message to a subpage within our main pump. s:es:Wikisource:Café/Noticias_Wikimedia. It seems to be a fair compromise. Maybe it can be the default way to treat small projects :) Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 20:04, 27 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Support ban on mass messaging Having a ban communicates that the messaging is inappropriate, and that mass messages should be exceptional and not routine. The effect of mass messages is the death of community discussion. Mass messages have spoiled the public commons and community space for marginal benefits mostly to the funded interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. For any community member to be heard, they have to compete against paid staff and paid projects for attention. The discussion boards were established for and by community, but this is not how they are currently used in 90% of community forums. It makes no sense to have 1000 local conversations of 10 people each to decide what to do when the problem originates at the top. Turning off the tap of mass messaging would prevent the flood. Almost everyone who is sending mass messages is engaged in unethical behavior to the detriment of the Wikimedia Movement. All can be forgiven for ignorance, but more awareness is needed for the problem.

A potential solution: the Wikimedia Foundation funds a project to establish messaging rules. We set a limit on how many messages go out per year, allocate quotas to different groups, then that is the limit on messages. Meta Wiki is not a social media platform, it cannot host messages without limit, and the current system unfairly favors anyone with money to post more messages. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:37, 28 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• The "MassMessage graveyards" are a serious problem, choking out any possibility of local discussions, which has been even pushing projects to offwiki forums to escape them. I think that each village pump should be checked for what percentage of sections are MassMessages, and for each one where local posts make up the minority of sections, the following actions should be taken:
  • The page should be removed from the distribution list.
  • An edit should be made to the page, removing or archiving all MassMessages (excluding those with responses). The removal edit would, in the edit summary, link to a page on Meta describing the situation, and explaining how to re-add the page to the distribution lists if desired, and how to set up a separate page on the project specifically for receiving MassMessages.
  • Further use of the MassMessage tool on the remaining fora should be restricted to particular cases, subject to review on Meta, and given a distinct "budget" (or at least, an aspirational goal for how low the level should be kept) for the various kinds of messages needed.
• --Yair rand (talk) 22:16, 6 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • But on the other side, cutting off projects from hearing about important global policy proposals is problematic. --Rschen7754 01:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    Could the global policy changes be limited to once per year? Wakelamp (talk) 14:08, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    @Wakelamp, do you really think people will prefer a single 100-page-long announcement to 200 smaller ones scattered throughout the year? At least with the shorter ones, it's easy to glance at it and decide whether you're personally interested. Also, you won't discover that you need to reply to 50 proposals in a single month, and have no information in the other 11 months.

    You can read about some prior discussions along these lines in phab:T130602. The specific task is closed, but the subject is still open for discussion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 10 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    Thank-you for the link Doh I thought they were talking about WMF created notices.

    "you won't discover that you need to reply to 50 proposals in a single month, and have no information in the other 11 months" You should see my full list (when it is done!)

    I have been looking at a few smaller wikis; there is little discussion or their pumps (so WMF are proposals are unlikely to be read), few articles are being created (sports, political leaders, local tv shows,entertainers,...) except by autotranslation (old versions of en articles that were auto translated, that have never been manually edited), few active editors,

    (And I am here because of my interest in mass messages , but also because of my interest in the affect of autotranslation on connectivity and community) Wakelamp (talk) 16:56, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

    A good deal of MassMessage postings are from the WMF. See, e.g., VisualEditor/Newsletter/2022/August for the last one that I caused to be inflicted on about a thousand pages. Qgil-WMF and his team have been encouraging the use of very short announcements, and I have been trying out that style. I think it helps reduce the amount of space taken up by announcements, but it doesn't address the problem of local people not using the wikis for communication. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Village pumps, or a selected alternate forum, are there for the exact purpose of receiving the communications of the broader Wikimedia. If those forums are getting too long, then how about we look to bot archive the respective forums, so we are simply clean up after ourselves.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:14, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Billinghurst, a bot is nice, but it's pretty significant overhead to maintain. I have wondered whether a sort of fake "auto-archiving" system would work better. Can redirects be combined with parser functions? Imagine that the page is currently titled Project:Village pump now, and I want it to become Project:Village pump 2022, to be followed by Project:Village pump 2023, etc. Could the undated page title be redirected to something like #REDIRECT[[Project:Village pump {{CURRENTYEAR}}]]?

  (Imagine if we'd done something like this to w:en:WP:ANI years ago. It wouldn't have accumulated 1.2 million edits, and instead we'd "only" have 75,000 per year – something that various stats tools can realistically process.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  The problem isn't the lack of an archive procedure. The problem is that the small amount of actual on-wiki discussion is buried within mass messages. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 17:42, 14 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  @Ignacio Rodríguez: The small number of edits is due to the small number of participants, not the number of posts on a page. Keeping the pages active, the posts relevant, and the pages readable (short enough) is about meeting the balance. We still want small communities to know what is happening and to participate.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:53, 15 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  You're not thinking with the perspective of a small wiki participant. Many people contribute every couple of weeks and check the village pump rarely. We may have one or two discussion every month, and months can go by without anyone posting anything there. Every time they enter there they only see the weekly tech newsletter intercalated with miscellaneous Wikimedia stuff (half of the time in English and not their native language), and buried within there's the real talk (e.g. my screenshot above). That's not a welcoming environment and it's not encouraging discussion and engagement. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 23:13, 15 October 2022 (UTC) PS: my preferred solution is what we did at esWS, to have a separate pump for "interwiki" mass messages. Of course if someone is decent enough to write to us directly they can use our main pump.Reply[reply]

  Another thing: MassMessages should include a direct link to the distribution list used to reach the community, so we can setup more accurately where should we organize those messages. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:20, 17 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Addition to WM:CSD one more code[edit]

We routinely delete IP userpage, but there isn't a formal CSD code for it. I propose adding one under Misc "Pages that are created by non-registered users". The pages tend to be able to meet G1/G3 (at times)/ G7 / M1 etc but IMHO a clear code will be beneficial. Ideas? Camouflaged Mirage (talk) 10:57, 30 September 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ready for translation: Education Newsletter September 2022[edit]

September 2022 education newsletter released for translation. Please help our readers to read education newsletter in their native language. The latest education newsletter is ready for translation: here Newsletter headlines link for translation: here (please translate by October 03, 2022) Individual articles for translation: Category:Education/Newsletter/September 2022. Regards, ZI Jony ^(Talk) 17:39, 2 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]