Wikipedia talk:Geonotice

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Geographical coordinates Geonotice is of interest to WikiProject Geographical coordinates, which encourages the use of geographical coordinates in Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.


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[edit] Reader information on use of geonotice-driven messages

We need better information on the user-side experience of geonotice-driven messages. The current information strikes me as written more for folks who want to use the system to create messages rather than those who are going to see them, who outnumber the first group by perhaps 4-6 orders of magnitude. The technical information provided is not written for the larger audience, and doesn't address obvious questions they would have:

  • How do I turn on the messages again after hiding them? (That is, without editing personal CSS or JavaScript pages, which most readers shouldn't have to learn how to do.)
  • Does hiding one message prevent me from seeing any later ones? (Especially important because people who find some useful will find others not.)
  • Where do I go for more information? (Most people with this question won't know about this page, even if it's expanded to address these issues. Expecting message-creators to provide this link is prone to error, and won't help folks who will reflexively dismiss geo-messages if they contain no link to more information about the message system itself.)

I'd also suggest, for the sake of readers, a more prominent and less technical statement about why they should trust that this apparently invasive detection of their whereabouts should not be a concern. Even though I know Wikimedia's privacy policies, and I follow Gmaxwell's explanation at Wikipedia talk:Meetup/DC 2#Geonotice, I think we need something simpler and clearer for a general audience. As a user of many websites I'm not interested in studying in depth (like many of readers here are), I usually find any website that attempts to offer me localized information based on its unasked-for deductions of where I am to be far too Big-Brotherish. I think we need a clear, bold, succinct sentence or two on why people can feel less anxious about this honest effort to be relevant.

In short, if we're going to splash these things on tens of thousands of user talk pages, they need to include a link to basic, reassuring information on how to use, disable, or selectively filter this system to satisfy their individual interests and concerns. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:05, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I'll answer your second message first: Right now turning off a message turns off ONLY that message. So if you turn off "NYC meeting on the 11th" thats all you've turned off. I think this mostly addresses your first question since you're not disabling all future messages I don't see a huge need to have an unhide button. If you can come up with one please let me know.
On my talk you asked about the next DC meetup. A date hasn't been set. Once one is set I'll talkpage ping everyone who listed themselves as interested in the last one. (And, do a geonotice as well). If you've listed yourself and you're active at all you wont miss it.
As far as the concerns about who will inform the readers, I'm afraid I'm not qualified to address this point because I don't really understand the underlying concern. The response I've had in person over the notice is overwhelmingly positive and I don't see how any additional statement is going to avoid causing a net decrease in comfort, something like WP:BEANS probably applies.
Right now every message has been written in a way which doesn't make it seem that the message is location targeted. This is very important because the targeting can be fairly imprecise (not inaccurate for the most part, just imprecise): "Hello resident of DC" would look pretty stupid to someone in New York. I think that writing the messages with this style will also have the side effect of not creating the "hey!hows it know where I am?". So you can of it as a system that avoids giving a message to people who won't care about it more than a system that targets specific people... that really is a more accurate representation of the behavior since while it's probably 100% effective at keeping the DC message from showing in AU or the UK, it can't keep it from showing up randomly on the east coast of the US. --Gmaxwell 18:54, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
A reason someone might want to have an unhide button is that they might hide the message accidentally, or they might read a message, hide it, then later on they may wish to refer back to the message and this may not be possible to do easily. Tra (Talk) 22:17, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Tra brings up exactly the kind of unanticipated user expectations that I'm thinking about. I highly recommend reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. Norman entertainingly describes the many ways fully competent designers will inevitably miss some logical uses (and abuses) of their designs. Frankly, I think it should be required reading for anyone doing or aspiring to any kind of engineering. ☺ ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:42, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Defunct?

This is defunct, right? If so, we should just close it down, because people are still posting requests, and they're never going to be answered.--Pharos 19:40, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Um huh, it's not defunct at all. I've run every request that I've been pointed to. But if no one brings my attention to them...--Gmaxwell 20:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
You mean you should be personally notified of every request? We should put that in the instructions then; I'm sure most people aren't even aware you designed this.--Pharos 16:39, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I hate this

It totally freaked me out today when I was signed in and yet here was this advertising banner ad telling me to come to some SF Wiki meet-up thing. I thought if I was signed-in I wasn't being tracked/stalked. Also the only thing it linked to was a bunch of stuff about party planner companies and architectural firms. This should be opt in. It also seems like advertising and I always liked that the Wikipedia was not about advertising. I am not an architect nor a party planner. I do not need this kind of spam infiltrating the one spam-free place on the web. This is a crappy new development. This is what Facebook is for. 70.143.75.31 (talk) 08:07, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

See the replies at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Wikimedia-SF spam at the top of my Wikipedia Pages ???, which clarify what this is about. Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 04:37, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merged, and simplified

I have merged Wikipedia:Requests for geonotice here, and simplified the process as well, because I think its overcomplication was discouraging widespread use. You can find some old discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for geonotice.--Pharos (talk) 21:35, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User control of location

I think if this is going to be used extensively, it would be great for a user account to be able to provide a list of geographic areas that user is interested in, and to allow the user to select whether that list is used in addition to or in place of the guess about where the IP address is located. In addition to the cases where the geolocation services get an IP address wrong, there are users who travel a lot to particular places who might want to attend a meetup if it happened to match their other travel plans, or might even want to adjust the dates of their travel plans. And a Boston resident who wanted to attend as many meetups as possible might very well want to attend all the meetups in New England. JNW2 (talk) 18:10, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

There was a bugzilla request filed some time ago for a user preference to represent user location. The request was rejected on the basis of wanting to avoid collecting additional private data about users which would need to be kept private. I've thought storing the data only locally in the user's browser, but that wouldn't address users traveling.--Gmaxwell (talk) 19:34, 16 March 2008 (UTC)