User:Johan (WMF)/The Problem of Tech News
Some personal notes, a draft
Tech/News is a publication focused on technical activity, usually written as bulleted items in one to three short and simple sentences, distributed in around 15 languages each week.
The reach and distribution depends on Tech News being a short, simple newsletter: if longer and/or more advanced, not only would it be impenetrable to more speakers of other languages than English, but we would probably see fewer translations to other languages, as translators are translating in their spare time over the weekend – often every weekend. The numbers of Wikimedians could read it in a language they're comfortable with would be fewer, at the same time as it would be more daunting to read.
What is Tech News? It can’t be something related to technology, because that would basically be any piece of news from the Wikimedia movement, since we’re a technical project. Yet people would like to put things that aren’t exactly technical into Tech News – probably because, well, where else should they put them? We have no other movement-wide newsletter distributed to the different wikis. The old newsletters have died. In the best of worlds, there’d be a Wikimedia newsletter similar to Tech News where non-technical things could be put. At the moment, that’d probably cannibalize resources and our pool of translators.
Tech News is rarely the best way to reach out to a community if the change only affects one wiki (with some exceptions: Wikidata and Commons are used by many other projects). It's usually easier to just post a notice on the local equivalent of the Village Pump (or wherever the community prefer to communicate). One of the main problems with WMF communication is that editors often feel it's not particularly relevant to them. A short "we did this on this specific wiki" usually is.
The community liaisons, mainly Johan, has taken over formal responsibility for the newsletter within the Wikimedia Foundation. Being the team within the Foundation tasked with being the bridge of communication between the WMF and the communities regarding everything that has to do with WMF technical products, they – we – have to be aware of the risks of dominating the newsletter too much. It's Wikimedia newsletter. It has guidelines and a very detailed manual. Anyone is supposed to be able to help out. If the liaisons act as if they claim too much ownership – and while they would never be able to do that on a content wiki such as Wikipedia, on Meta, the Foundation can sometimes give that impression – it could make it more difficult for anyone else to help out.
The timeline is an issue. The problem is that it needs to be dependable. The translators need time to translate. Publication can't be postponed several days, or the news won't be news anymore and the changes during the week it's supposed to be able to prepare the editors for will already have happened.
Possible things to do: Mark recurring items in some nice way. Mark items relevant only to tool/gadget/template/etc developers, or separate them in some way?