Last modified: 2014-11-04 22:49:38 UTC
At the moment, CentralNotice displays on a per-language basis, due to the organization of Wikimedia wikis. However, it would be useful if it were possible to display a notice to only a geographical area, e.g. if there is an upcoming or ongoing event in that area. The logical way to do this would be to link CentralNotice with Geolocation. Geolocation is already done on en.wp watchlist notifications, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice This also gives a flavour for the type of notice that this feature would be useful for. The major drawbacks with the current method are 1. the lack of visibility (the watchlist page, whilst high traffic, does not have the same visibility as the whole of the site), and 2. It only displays the information to registered and logged in users. Geolocation currently runs on the Toolserver, so it would need to be installed on Wikimedia servers first. I believe that work is being done to this end for the 2009-2010 winter fundraising drive.
*** Bug 22873 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Hi! I know we'd like to use Geonotice to notify community members of local event; and it would be quite helpful if this feature were implemented, notably for places like Montreal, where the population is not primarily centered on any one wiki!
The fundraising engineering team is eager to take this on as a project and were currently in talks with the operations team about what it would take to host this. Currently were waiting on Mark to to continue his varnish testing so that we can benchmark what kind of request load we can handle. After we know that we can support our throughput, then we'll look at how to standardize the interface and the integration into central notice.
This was implemented as part of September 2010 CentralNotice phase II development.
