Submissions/Movement Broadcasting - 'Stop Spamming' vs. 'Nobody Told Me'

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.
76
Title of the submission

'Stop Spamming' vs. 'Nobody Told Me' - the state and future of movement broadcasting mechanisms

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

T. Bayer

E-mail address

tbayer at wikimedia dot org

Username

Tbayer (WMF) (talk)

Country of origin

Germany

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Wikimedia Foundation

Personal homepage or blog
Co-speaker

MZMcBride (talk)

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

As the landscape of Wikimedia projects continues to grow and diversify, many people in the Wikimedia movement are struggling with the problem of movement broadcasting—the dissemination of announcements or other timely information to a large number of recipients from Wikimedia projects within a short amount of time. There are various off-wiki venues available—mailing lists, the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, social media, etc.—however, experience has shown that many Wikimedians don't frequent these outlets and expect to receive such information via their home wiki instead. It has been argued that such movement communication problems have exacerbated various conflicts such as last year's image filter debates.

This presentation will start by giving an overview of existing and possible future use-cases of movement broadcasting. For example, announcing Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees or steward elections, notification of software changes or impending Wikimedia Foundation policy modifications, cross-wiki distribution of newsletters (e.g. the Signpost or "This Month in GLAM"), coordination of cross-wiki work groups such as translators, or enhancing the ability of WikiProject-like entities to reach out to contributors and invite them to participate in suitable tasks. It will then review the various existing mechanisms, including non-fundraiser uses of the CentralNotice extension, the global message delivery system at Meta-Wiki (EdwardsBot, which started out on the English Wikipedia, where it has distributed over 150,000 individual messages so far), the presentation will touch on some of the difficulties encountered when informing such a diverse audience, not the least of which include the multilingual nature of the movement.

Finally, the presentation will explore possibilities for a more streamlined, user-friendly and technically sound solution, taking into account various existing proposals and related work (e.g. [1], [2],[3] ) and possibly also ongoing work by the Wikimedia Foundation. Especially for this last part, the input of participants will be very welcome. We will leave ample room for discussion and invite participants to describe their own use-cases, and—depending on interest—it is also conceivable to integrate panel- or workshop-like elements into this event.

Slides as used in the presentation
Track
  • WikiCulture and Community; Research, Analysis, and Education
  • Technology and Infrastructure


Length of presentation/talk
25 Minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Not sure

Slides or further information (optional)

Slides as used in the presentation

Special request as to time of presentations


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  1. Edsu (talk) 12:38, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  2. SarahStierch (talk) 21:10, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Eloquence (talk) 00:29, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Shunlingchen (talk) 17:33, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. CT Cooper · talk 19:22, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  6. JayWalsh (talk) 17:48, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Psychology (talk) 16:41, 27 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Graham87 (talk) 13:04, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 19:05, 12 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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