North American Wikimedians/Communication project

In 2025-25, North American Wikimedians are coordinating a project to develop communication infrastructure for the North American Hub. This infrastructure will include development of the CentralNotice tool to enable our hub to give new editors notice of campaigns and events, and development of a hub membership registry to collect the contact information of existing editors who want to receive notice of events. The problem we are trying to address is lack of communication infrastructure to 1) recruit new campaign participants, then 2) guide them into a process where they can stay engaged. The CentralNotice tool is excellent for making editors aware of campaigns, but because of its complexity and potential for error, we need to develop it technically, and with technical documentation, and with user documentation, and to be maintained. To keep users engaged after campaign recruitment, we will develop a technical and social communication strategy.

See more information about this program at Grants:Programs/Hub Fund/North American Hub 2025

CentralNotice

CentralNotice is a powerful tool for giving notice to Wikimedians. Typical use is to invite people to participate in campaigns, events, calls for comment, or programs.

North American Wikimedians are developing infrastructure for using this tool.

Context

The movement has long struggled with establishing sustainable means to reach out and keep in contact with editors. Affiliates and grassroots initiatives use a variety of tools, including wikimedia mailing lists, their own mailing lists, social media, individual and mass messages posted on users talk pages, discord servers and a series of private messaging apps. Some affiliates use social media effectively; others do not. The lack of common tools or strategies afford flexibility for new groups and initiatives, but also results in fragmented communication, difficulties to keep in touch with previous events attendees, and difficulties reaching to new editors. The subject was discussed in interviews summarized in the NA research report (2024).

Currently, the affiliates and proposed user groups rely on geonotices to announce most events, and central notices a couple times a year (in particular Wikipedia Day and Wiknic). A single Wikimedian in the hub is able to use the central notice system and handles all of these requests. While we want to beconservative in the use of central notices to prevent banner blindness, this is a key tool for which updates are long overdue. Improvements and simplification of the interface would benefit the movement and Wikimedians beyond the North America Hub. We see these technical improvements as one of the aspect of improving communication and outreach.

These kinds of changes to CentralNotice would help reduce the complexity of setting up a banner (campaign). Our Hub will explore them and try to design and supportrtWe would like to focus on the following updates: Improving the notice submission page by: making the geographic targeting easier with a visual widget, and reusable geographic target areas; Providing a structured form to choose a basic banner template and fill in information (similar to article banners); or to reuse a past banner template easily, or to draw some information from a CampaignEvents template; Enabling a banner designer to see a preview of it; And studying the feasibility of targeting editors working on a particular subset of thematic pages, as Wikiprojects that enabled mass talk page messages are not available on all namespaces and more rarely used.

We shall coordinate with WMF Fundraising developers and other interested parties, and anticipate hiring at least one software contractor acceptable to the WMF.

Planned output

• Produce technical specifications for CentralNotice feature requests
• Produce any of those features
• Create technical documentation for the created features
• Create user documentation for the created features

Email and other contact

Wikimedia community members often value privacy. For anyone who does not want to share personal contact such as email address, they do not have to do so.

For others who wish to receive communication by email and otherwise, North American Wikimedians are developing options to receive email updates, and options for using other popular communication channels to participate.

Planned output

• Publish a communication strategy which includes the following:
  • A recommendation on social processes for requesting, collecting, and messaging people who want email or other North American Hub communication
  • A security disclosure about privacy and risks of disclosing contact information
  • A recommendation on technical processes for the same
• A survey of the current state of regional communication
  • What are popular Wikimedia communication channels for this region, who uses them, and how
  • What requests do we have for regional communication options