Talk:CentralNotice/Calendar

/Archive

Francophone Contribution Month 2018

Thanks Benoit Rochon for the calendar addition and for specifying the language, user registration and diet restrictions. On the other hand, using the notice for 2 months out of 12 is rather extreme and would benefit from some impact assessment on your end (maybe considering discussion participants or such?).

As a simple tweak to make sure that all users who log in know about the initiative while not being brought to hate it by an excessive repetition, you may further improve the diet by reducing it to 5 (or less) impressions every 2 weeks. Considering that there are many French-language wikis and that active users visit them with multiple devices, that will still mean seeing the notice dozens times, as opposed to hundreds in the currently proposed diet. Nemo 08:27, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello Nemo, both notices are targeting two different public, within two timeframes. The first one (Jan) is for Wikimedians, then is March is for newcomers. As you suggest, I will improve the diet for no flooding. Best regards. Benoit Rochon (talk) 00:44, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

ItWikiCon banner

Ilario, the current banner is sending everyone's IP address to Google. The linked resource needs to respect the privacy policy. --Nemo 09:55, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

@Ilario: - Feel free to use the following call for the time being. But ideally fonts should be locally hosted.:

@font-face {

font-family: 'Montserrat';

font-style: normal;

src: local('Montserrat'), local('Montserrat'), url(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/donate/c/cd/Montserrat.woff2) format('woff2');}

Seddon (WMF) (talk) 10:06, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: @Seddon (WMF): I use Web Safe Fonts and they are universal fonts which comes pre-installed with the operating systems and browsers. There should not be lnked resources, is not it? I don't use Google fonts. --Ilario (talk) 19:11, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

@Ilario:, I think that Nemo is referring to the website the banners point to. The site is calling montserrat via googles font api. Seddon (WMF) (talk) 01:15, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Also, the "close" button is not working and the diet is not set. I've already seen this banner hundreds of times. Please set a reasonable maximum number of impressions (5 is plenty) over the whole time, given the calendar mentions a whopping 6 weeks. --Nemo 12:13, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

Old campaigns being reused

Hello

I'm reusing some old campaigns for a read-only window that will happen on 2020-05-07. They are labelled 2019-04-11_Maintenance_window_XXX with XXX standing for a wiki name. This is normal.

The context is that they match databases clusters, here s3. When I created these campaigns last year, I didn't think about the fact that the could be reused. I've started investigations around renaming the campaigns to match the clusters, which would make things much clearer.

So please don't disable them because of the wrong date! :D

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

So it is not possible to rename campaigns. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF): Thanks for the heads up. Duplicating them (and saving the copy under a new name) does not solve the problem? Ciell (talk) 17:37, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

POTY 2020 banners pushed back 7 days

Sincere apologies, but I've had to push the POTY 2020 banners on 7 days owing to some tech issues with the campaign setup. c/p Steinsplitter - is there anything else I need to do? firefly ( t · c ) 09:56, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Since there will also be a banner running for all languages/all projects for the Movement Charter, I actually think these dates are a better option. :) R2 does still fall in the same week as the second Movement Charter banner, so you could try and contact JKoerner (WMF) and see if one of you could move back/forward, etc? Ciell (talk) 18:25, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Fundraiser March 2024

Hi @JBrungs (WMF), Would it be possible to start the fundraisers in March a bit later, for instance after the weekend / 10 March, because of the campaigns for international women's day and the activities world wide that might also want some attention of the non-registered people? Ciell (talk) 19:03, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Ciell

Yes, sorry. These campaigns moved back by a month anyway, I just hadn't adjusted CN yet. It is now updated in the calendar. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 06:00, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

thanks! Ciell (talk) 02:00, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Africa Wiki Challenge 2024 Banner

Hello,

I made a banner request for the Africa Wiki Challenge 2024, however it does not reflect on the request table.

Kindly assist with that Kaffzz (talk) 13:44, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Banners for new technical features

hmm, i am receiving a banner for a new technical feature... (sub-referencing) is this an experiment? Are we now going to announce every (significant) new feature this way? Given that we already have banner exhaustion, I have some doubts about whether this is a desirable direction. @Johannes Richter (WMDE): courtesy ping. Effeietsanders (talk) 22:23, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Effeietsanders, I'm sorry if you're not interested in the announcement. We've created the sub-referencing banner with a very restrictive diet (low priority – only shows if there are nor other banners to display; limit traffic to 50% of the users and a maximum of two impressions per user). Assuming you already saw it twice, you shouldn't see it more often (unless you are active in many different projects, unfortunately there is no way to implement a global impression limit, instead CentralNotice is counting local impressions per project).

I cannot answer your general question, but it's not uncommon for major changes to be announced via CentralNotice. Last month there was a WMF banner for mobile users to announce the new dark mode, last year the WMF used banners to announce the new discussion tools and several banners to inform about Vector 2022, encourage users to switch to V22 and announce the deployment of V22 as a new default in certain wikis.

Given that (almost) all wikis are impacted by the new sub-referencing feature and all users will encounter it once people start using it in their articles, we decided to use a banner to increase visibility and make sure more people have the chance to provide further feedback.

Unfortunately it's not easy to find the right balance between too much noise and too little communication about technical developments. Some users already complained that they felt surprised by our feature announcement, even though it has been in work for years with many community consultations. Others like you seem to be fine with announcements just in technical spaces (which of course limits the visibility). That's why we decided for a banner with broad audience, but low diet -> many people should see it, but it shouldn't annoy them once they click it away. Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 04:59, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

There are of course many technical changes that could be vaguely of interest to editors. Generally, I think they fall in different categories. There's technical changes that are essential to their work (for example if it affects how unregistered users behave, or when certain functionality stops working), there's changes that may benefit them a lot, and there's this category of changes which may be helpful, but there's not really any urgency in them learning about it. My guess would be that something like 'dark mode' may affect templates etc that depend on background colors, and if there's a breaking change coming up, that may also be good to know about. I don't know who would be best placed to make this determination which features fall in which category - but I suspect some level of restraint is helpful (and perhaps we should think about using the "notifications" workflow instead for this anyway, or consider some on-demand "recent features").

The diet is one element in that conversation, but it's not the only one. What worries me quite a lot more, is when these determinations are constantly made on a case-by-case basis, and by who. For example, in your case: who made the decision to go for the centralnotice? Is there any coordination and prioritization? When I read your response, it sounds like you don't have guidelines or criteria that you're being asked to consider. Am I understanding that correctly, or are there internal guidelines at play as well? Effeietsanders (talk) 21:14, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree on the categories, but disagree partly on your judgement of sub-referencing. Yes, it's an optional feature and users can continue to use current ways of citing sources. But even though using the feature is optional, we are also doing a lot of general work and code improvements on the Cite extension and Citoid, which may affect all projects and all users, even when they are using other ways of citing sources.

We've seen that recently when a change by us suddenly conflicted with some local CSS (phab:T370512) or when another change affected a local citation template (also due to local CSS rules -> phab:T371839). Although we do a lot of testing on desktop/mobile, wikitext and VisualEditor, there are so many edge cases with local templates, local CSS etc. that certain functionality might stop working simply because we can't know about all details related to citations in all projects. That's another reason why we need communities to be aware of our work, to quickly report bugs related to citations to us, once the feature will be deployed.

But it's not just about bugs: Similar to dark mode we are implementing a wish which appeared many times on the global Community Wishlist Surveys (which also get a banner by the way). In order to make sure the feature meets the needs and expectations of community members across different projects, we need to get feedback from many people. Even though we've used a lot of other methods to get community feedback (mass messages, posts to relevant talk pages, mailing lists etc.) in past years, we never got as much valuable community feedback as in the past week due to the banner announcement.

There are documented best practices at WMDE on how to communicate software changes, but nothing like ("if conditions x, y, z are met, you can/should use a banner, if not don't..."). I'm not aware of the WMF having such criteria, but I will ask them to get a common understanding about this. There is CentralNotice/Usage guidelines#Campaign implementation asking for relevant targets (that's why our banner wasn't displayed at projects like Commons or Wikidata, because those projects don't use references). In case of our banner it was me proposing the banner to our team and implementing it later.

Generally speaking about CentralNotice (from my perspective being also a volunteer): Most banner requests are being judged on a case-by-case basis with the usage guidelines as an orientation of how it should be ideally, but there are many things unfortunately not defined in those guidelines. The foundation has recently hired someone to support CN admins and one main objective is improving documentation and workflows regarding CentralNotice, where we might also sort out questions like "when/how can WMF or affiliates like WMDE use CN banners?". Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 06:15, 28 August 2024 (UTC)