Talk:CentralNotice/Process Review

Central Notice Campaign Request Process - What are our expectations from such a process?

I am very much interested in hearing from the existing volunteers what it is that they are looking for from a process whereby affiliates and online communities can request support for campaigns. At present many requests come through personal requests. This means not all affiliates have easy access to Central Notice and there is no clear method by which someone can request assistance. The aim is to provide this for all stakeholders who use Central Notice for their work.

A strawman intended to start this discussion can be see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jseddon_(WMF)/CentralNotice/Request

What do we as central notice administrators need from this process? What does the community expect from such a process? What do the affiliates need?

The intention is simply at first to create a basic process. In time we can look at more fancy lua templates and functionality through forms etc. But for now. Lets keep it simple and at least make it work. Jseddon (WMF) (talk) 02:22, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

A couple of thoughts

"To a man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." I think we need to figure out what our objectives are and then figure out whether a large advertising slot at the top of the page is an appropriate solution to some or all of the problems we're attempting to solve. We have other types of software notices that may make sense to utilize and/or merge into CentralNotice. We also have Echo notifications and tools such as MassMessage now.

Any formal banner request process, if implemented, shouldn't use horrible wiki templates and a wall of text. It should use a real HTML form with proper text input fields and checkboxes and such. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:02, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: I completely agree with you on pretty much all of what you have said here so Ill break down my responses:

• On the software front I agree that where we use a hammer we could probably do with some better surgical equipment. Echo, although cross wiki support is now in beta, currently can't send notifications through any kind of geotargeting or category targeting and it seems you can't construct your own notifications. And with MassMessage, its useful but again I think it's bulky and at the moment probably asks more effort from users to build the user list than the effort required to create a banner. You shouldn't have to go around visiting every wiki you are going to deliver to before hand to ensure it's linked to your global account for example.
• I agree we should actually have the request process built into the extension however that isn't going to happen any time soon with the fr-tech team since it would be a pretty low priority request given their other work and the sheer amount of it. It would be 6-9 months if not longer. As a halfway house step I was thinking about using form wizard to at least make the experience for the user better since it does a pretty good job at places like Grants:IEG. That's more achievable on a scale of months but to get to that stage we need to go through what the structure and page would look like and so it's something to look to down the line. I suppose for now it's working with the simplest tools we have and get something in place that I can do in a matter of weeks. Rather than waiting months for the first option only for it to potentially never happen :P Jseddon (WMF) (talk) 11:34, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

• Imho it shouldn't be too bureaucratic. The process schould be here to determinate if concerns to host a banner exists or not. If no concerns: then it schould be allow to host the banner without a lot lot of bureaucratic stuff (such as formal voting etc). :-) --Steinsplitter (talk) 14:59, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
• I agree to Steinsplitter: it shouldn't be too bureaucratic. Yet it would be helpful to make a subpage on every CN campaign group - you can find its details easier. Sometimes it is difficult to find which campaign in Special:CentralNotice is tha same as the one in CentralNotice/Calendar now.--miya (talk) 21:43, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Clearer guidelines on campaigns setups

I think my main concern is the lake of clear guidelines. There is not restriction for example to direct traffic to a 3rd website, that not follow Wikimedia's privacy policy. For example we saw few months ago a banner directing people to register to a conference, not related to the Wikimedia movement - just because the chairperson of the chapter was one of the speakers. Another case was a foundation banner, that kind of promote a 3rd service, mentioning their name, and directing to their website, where they promote and sell their services including using tracking pixel such facebook pixel. CentralNotice is the most powerful and the most important tool we have. Such cases don't need to happen from my point of view. --Itzike (talk) 12:02, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Make it easier to set up nicer banners

Offering my input. Not that I have many intelligent things to say about CentralNotice (I think the adjoining page that lists the problems covers it well), but it should be easier to set up a campaign based on a template. All the code is filled out, and you just need to add the text. Also, these templates should look nice; while the WMF has the resources to update the designs, many of us are still using the older, uglier templates. Also, it would be nice to make it easy to do A/B tests so we can see which templates are most effective. (I understand the functionality technically exists now but I don't recall it being easy to use.) harej (talk) 08:19, 24 May 2016 (UTC)