Talk:CentralNotice/Usage guidelines

There still needs to be a page where future banners can be discussed and get consensus. --Yair rand 01:03, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

So create one? --MZMcBride 18:58, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Given that it's not currently clear who can approve a banner and how (it's basically "anyone with sort-of-sysop rights on Meta as he feels"), it's a bit difficult, but I'll try to write something. Anyway, see Meta talk:Central notice requests. Nemo 08:23, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

CentralNotice usage guidelines

Um, nice try, I guess. Not a chance in hell that you're somehow empowered to appoint a Chancellor of CentralNotice, though. What's wrong with you recently? --MZMcBride (talk) 18:03, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree, why was this done? It seems to be an attempt to enforce your will about the Wiknic notice, which was taken down for anonymous users without community involvement, by fiat. The current page already mentions the special authority staff have when it comes to fundraising banners, so I don't see why this would be necessary. Dominic (talk) 18:09, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

I didn't appoint. :-) I don't have that power, you're quite right. But the WMF needed to delegate someone to be our voice on it, and that's what we've done. But no, I didn't do it. I just documented it. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 8 June 2012 (UTC

Note: This was originally brought up on User talk:Philippe (WMF) and was moved here as a more generic location. The above notes were originally on that discussion

• Bringing this here to the Usage Guidelines talk page:

• First off to the Chancellor of CentralNotice comment I thought I should clarify my role, or at least how I see my role.
  • It's still in flux clearly and I didn't ask for it but I do think 'someone' has to. Evidently the 'powers that be' (between fundraising and comms and LCA and possibly others) talked through Central Notice and everyone agreed that someone needed to be paying attention to it and trying to keep it under control a bit. Of course, as things usually are, no one wanted to own it and so it was decided (without me in the meeting) that it would be me.
  • The 'VAST' majority of this task (which is a very small part of my job anyway) is to be keeping an eye on it INTERNALLY to make sure that departments and groups within the foundation do not overuse or abuse CN and try to make sure they know what they're doing with it.
  • Those that have known me on wiki for a while will know that I've been doing this at times for a very long time. For the past couple years (especially since around 2010) I've thought the CN was being over used (and that it just got more over used not less). We have a very 'wild wild west' attitude where any meta admin can throw it up without any real consensus or decision making process. It was routinely used because it was a giant billboard and because it could effectively 'avoid' local community consensus gathering (especially for enWiki but also elsewhere) especially when the local communities tended to think they had no real way to stop it (even when they are highly annoyed). We also show it (without almost no way for them to give input or complain) to 100s of millions of people over billions of page views frequently when we only want a tiny tiny fraction of them to care (say when we really only WANT 250-1000 registrations for a conference or something like that).
  • This has become a bigger problem with relatively few people (such as MZMcBride ) patrolling its use with little more then a strong voice to back them up (which luckily is almost always enough). In the community that's basically all I see myself as, another strong voice to say 'no, that's ridiculous you need to rethink that' and raise the complaints.
  • The reality is that it is essentially impossible to get community consensus for a Central Notice (even the rare time that there is some meta discussion it isn't even close to consensus for the projects it's going to be run on and is barely enough to people to declare consensus on meta). Because of that I think it needs to be patrolled with an eye for trying to make sure it stays under control and isn't over used because when it is it screws over everyone who wants to use it later and doesn't actually even get exactly what the user is usually going for. At some level I do think it's a WMF tool, I know that not everyone agrees on that but it's something that I felt long before I joined the foundation and is a feeling I've heard from a lot of Wikipedians who have been around a whole lot longer then I have and so I'm fairly confident on it. That said I don't intend to ever use that power if I can avoid it, I think it's a whole lot better to try and work something out that gets everyone what they want. Usually they just don't realize that they aren't getting what they want with that added week of anonymous etc.
• For the Wiknik notice specifically:
  • I think 2 weeks of anonymous is far far too much. Showing it to that many people for what is really a very small target audience is extreme. I've said this to many others and they've basically all agreed and drastically cut the anonymous timing (which still gives them 100s of millions of page views even if it's just for 1-3 days). The current WikiCon registration banner is an example of that. I know I've talked to Pharos and I'm sure we can find enough time to make sure lots and lots of people see it.

• For guidelines overall:
  • I think we need to have a discussion and try and come up with better guidelines on who should be using CN and why and for how long. Is an event in a whole country or multi countries ok? Is that ok for 1-3 days of anonymous and 1 week of logged in or something else entirely? Are there different rules on EN because they have a bigger system with logged in geonotices etc?
  • I do think we have to remember that, for now, our communication systems kinda suck. I'm a big fan of Watchlist notices (including geonotice where available) but they're logged in only, site notices and anonnotices can't be geolocated, village pumps (and hence global delivery spots) are read by a tiny TINY amount of people on most wikis especially on EN. Until we get better communication systems we're going to want to take that into account but we still want to make sure that CN isn't nuts. Jalexander (talk) 21:32, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

For the Wiknic in particular and Anons in general and also echoing "our comms suck":

IMHO, all of the positions here on Anon use duration are wrong. Philippe and James and Pharos are all wrong. ;)

1-3 days is far too short. Showing to all anon views across all of enwiki is too broad. We need to be able to tweak other factors/tests when deciding to show or not for a particular impression. e.g.:

• has this user edited during this session? (while logged out)
• how many page views have they had this session?
• how long have they spent browsing Wikipedia?
• how many times have we shown the Wiknic banner to them so far this session?
• have they viewed much outside mainspace?

I'm sure there's plenty of other questions people can come up with. We need to be able to make choices based on those variables and also allow displaying for some sample (say 1% or 5%) of all other people (that otherwise wouldn't make the cut). Also, if we're displaying for some but not all then I think we need to be able to have an unobtrusive button somewhere on the page people can click to see what the banner would have shown. (in case they see it but don't click and then come back later looking for it) My $.2 as a CN noob. Jeremyb (talk) 03:38, 9 June 2012 (UTC)