The goal is to offer the Newsletter features to all Wikimedia users while keeping one centralized list of newsletters.
There is an underlying assumption that different wikis could host different newsletters locally, decentralizing the creation/administration of those newsletters and offering a local experience for different languages and projects. However, there might be other approaches to accomplish the same goal, i.e. having all newsletters hosted in one wiki and resolve localization and interwiki sync in other ways, like Commons or Wikidata does.
User stories (draft)
- As an anonymous user, I can easily find a list with all the newsletters available in Wikimedia.
- As a registered user, I can subscribe/unsubscribe easily to any of the newsletters featured in the list.
- As a registered user, I can request the creation of a newsletter in my own wiki / in my own language.
- As a subscriber of newsletters, I can receive web or email notifications containing the summary and the link of the issue announced.
- As a publisher of newsletters, I can easily access my newsletter and announce new issues regardless of their location.
- As a wiki administrator (or whoever has permissions to create newsletters) I can review/create/remove newsletters hosted in my wiki.
Background
In an ideal Wikimedia world, the Newsletter extension would have interwiki support. There would be a catalog of Newsletters in Meta (or replicated in every wiki?) and users could browse and subscribe to newsletters regardless of their primary wiki and their primary language. This implementation is most probably complex through, both in terms of UI and backend. During the GSoC phase it was clear that such feature was out scope. The question is, should the first implementation in Wikimedia include interwiki support?
Another way to look at this problem is that Newsletter extension in a single wiki already provides enough improvements, and the model needs to be tested and consolidated anyway. We would start with mediawiki.org (usual first destination of technical innovations) or Meta (home of Tech News and cross-project collaboration) and interwiki support would come at a later stage. We would need to decide whether the extension would be enabled in a single wiki only, or whether different wikis could have it installed, with a plan to merge all that data in a later stage.