User:Snowolf/Draft

This is just a braindump of the ideas and concepts, feel free to comment

Aims[edit]

To provide a vehicle for delivery of interesting and/or important news to Wikimedians, without a focus on a single project (like the Signpost).

No editorials or opinion pieces
They're hard to write, hard to get right, hard to translate and generally not even that interesting
No mandatory translations
Translations are good, and should be welcomed, but they should not delay publication
Short items, maybe one or two lines
Lengthy pieces end up delaying publication, require a lot of effort to write and translate and take time to read
Items should be an undefined "important" or an undefined "interesting"
Readers shouldn't have to parse thru unimportant stuff to get to the stuff they're interested int

No need to tell people what FA was promoted on fiwiki or what admin got elected on azwiki

It might be worthwhile to showcase items not necessarily important but interesting: I'm thinking of innovative ideas and projects on one wiki that other wikis might have interest in to learn from them and whatnot
It should necessarily be 'NPOV', but it should strive to be fairly neutral and have a global Wikimedia outlook
The target audience should be experienced users, especially globally active users
The idea is to let users know X happened/is happening and where they can find more info if they're interested
Materials should be worked on wiki or in other non-private venues (etherpad, IRC)

Possibly viable news items should be dumped in chronological order on a page on meta by interested users from the various wikis or from people interested in the project

Items considered worthwhile to run are turned into a one-two line format with relevant link

Should be released on a regular schedule, news items might no longer be relevant if published too late
Should be released biweekly or monthly, depending on how much news we find (to clarify I'm thinking of a fixed schedule, not a "as needed" one, but it's hard to forecast what that schedule should be at this stage)

New extensions or features that can be deployed on wikis that request it (Flow, Article Feedback Tool)
New major features (IPv6 support, Wikidata)

New wikis being created
Board resolutions
Abandonment of the Wikimedia trademark request
Useful new tools available (global preferences/synchbot)
Major happenings (greek wiki admin being sued, legal dispute with wikitravel, jimbo using his powers outside of enwiki)
Interesting new ideas that could use more widespread adoption (wikichart tool)
Maybe we could have one useful idea/tool to highlight per publication or something like that
Global RfCs
Steward elections/confirmations
Board elections
Major Foundation news (new CEO/deputy CEO)
Commons content news
Limited to news of interest outside of the commons community, such as major donations of material (so that local users know it's there and they can go get it)
Wikidata news
Limited to news with global repercussions on local communities rather than just status updates

any local elections, be it arbcom, cu/os, admin, crat, etc
Bot approvals
Have to be vigilant on news from enwiki, they already have the signpost to broadcast important things to the rest of the Wikimedia universe so only major stuff with cross-wiki repercussion should be featured