Site notices policy
This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum. |
Site notices are used on all of the Wikimedia wikis at once to announce important and rare events and changes, and are co-ordinated by the Communications Committee.
Possible reasons for a site notice being applied include:
- Fundraising drives
- Wikimania-related events
- Important technical changes
General policies
editSilent periods
editThere should be silent periods between any two planned uses of the sitewide notice. Except for unexpected/emergency circumstances, and excepting continual uses of the anonymous-user message, the all-project sitewide notice should be blank for at least 3 days between uses.
Advance notice
editShort, timely messages about upcoming changes to site performance or structure should be up for at least 3 hours before the change, where possible, and no more than a week before.
Message periods
editMessages should be up for at least 3 hours at a stretch. Messages for logged-in users should be up for at most 1 month at a stretch (else the interface should perhaps be updated...)
Fundraising example
editThe Fundraising site notice will be placed on all wikis during organised Wikimedia fundraising drives. The first of these is 20 September - 3 October 2004.
The message can be changed using MediaWiki:Sitenotice. This template allows you to append arbitrary site-wide informations with the possibility to use templates (these need to be pulled from the MediaWiki namespace to provide a non-localized fallback) for recurring events.
The notice will be removed if MediaWiki:Sitenotice contains only a hyphen (-).
If the message is not translated, the default English message will be shown. This includes an [edit] link to make it easy for admins on each wiki to change the message. If you are not an admin, but would like to translate the message, please leave the translation on the talk page, and alert a steward at requests for permissions#Fundraising notices.
The message can be edited by any administrator at MediaWiki:Sitenotice. The message will be shown only for the specified fundraising period. It will automatically turn off at the end of this time.
The style of the message can be changed in MediaWiki:Monobook.css by specifying the CSS you want for #fundraising. For example:
- #fundraising {border: 1px solid gray; padding:5px;}
The [edit] link only appears until it is edited. After that, the message is saved to MediaWiki:Sitenotice. Before it is saved, MediaWiki:Sitenotice might not exist, and the text will be taken from a default set by a developer, which includes the [edit] link. If you want the edit link to remain after you save it, you need to type that into the MediaWiki:Fundraising notice page. For example [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:MediaWiki:Sitenotice|action=edit}} Edit this message] will produce Edit this message.
Users who would rather not see the message, can set #fundraising {display:none;} in their User:yourname/monobook.css page.
It is recommended that the message remains protected during the fundraising drive. By default, the message will usually be protected already. If you find it is not protected on your wiki, please contact a local administrator, or a steward if you have no admins.
Example messages
editDefault
editInformation on this message - Edit this message
English
editSee also: Server outage message