Last modified: 2007-03-29 21:24:02 UTC
I've been getting people to put up the Wikimania registration notice on various projects, but there's a general dislike for this particular notice appearing in the article namespace. The sitenotice was removed on de: because of that. OTOH, I know from experience that if the notice is put up just on individual pages, like recent changes or watchlists, editors who don't use those features often rightfully complain that they weren't informed of important community issues. The obvious solution is to have community notices appear on all pages used by editors, but not in articles which are used primarily by readers. One way would be to add a new MediaWiki message (maybe Communitynotice) for that purpose. I'm also told that use of any {{}} construct in the sitenotice would have a significant impact on the servers, so I won't try that. The easiest way seems to be to add the following line to main.css: body.ns-0 .hideinarticles { display:none } This would allow projects which don't want particular notices in the article namespace to hide them by putting them in <div class="hideinarticles"></div>, without requiring any changes to php code.
What's difficult about adding this CSS to the sitewide CSS?
The difficult part is getting people who are admins on dozens of projects where you don't even contribute to translate and post the sitenotice, let alone getting them to fiddle with site css. The alternative plan is to do it for them with temp adminship. If we have to do that (and we may have to on smaller projects), I'd rather annoy as few people as possible.
Why would you have to get anyone to do anything? If people on a specific project *want* some sitenotices to be hidden, they can do it with CSS. If they don't care, so what?
It's pureley a problem of getting something done in a certain period of time. I can ask people on a few dozen projects to put up the notice (on behalf of the Communications committee), and hope they leave it in, check back with each of the project every day for the next two and half weeks, and if they don't like it and remove it, ask them to consider using css to hide it from article namespace, etc. Or, I can give them two versions of the notice and explain how to hide it if they wish in advance, and make it simple enough that any admin on any project can do it, even if they're clueless with css. It's simply a question of one person doing something useful in one place, instead of many people having to do it in many places. Alternatively, a very nice solution which would free us from the entire process would be a feature for foundation-wide notices which could be tuned to show in certain namespaces and use translated versions if they exist.
Hacking one skin doesn't help all users. Not a clean solution. (In reply to comment #4) > Alternatively, a very nice solution which would free us from the entire process > would be a feature for foundation-wide notices which could be tuned to show in > certain namespaces and use translated versions if they exist. I've been asked about this before and I've stated that I'll do it when I get the time. The amusing thing here is that the entire "communications committee" doesn't seem to know what everyone else is doing/arranging regarding this whole issue; since if you'd been listening, you'd know that.
I know that this is going on, and it's great that it is. However, the deadline for Wikimania stipends is in one week and these notices need to be put up in a matter of days, if we want them to have any effect. Many people don't edit Wikipedia every day, especially now when the summer has started and the school term is over in much of Europe.
Adding into the div style: display: {{#ifeq: {{NAMESPACE}}||none|block}}; will show it everywhere but in main namespace. Note that this may have perfomance problems. Although if you use it and someone cares about it slowing the servers, they will hurry with this bug ;)
(In reply to comment #7) > Note that this may have perfomance problems. Although if you use it and someone > cares about it slowing the servers, they will hurry with this bug ;) What a ridiculous attitude.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 4469 ***
