Hi. When wikimediafoundation.org was first established (as a fishbowl wiki), there were concerns expressed about its lack of open editing. For one of the most prominent wiki and community-based organizations to have a closed site for its non-profit foundation is rather silly and anachronistic. The wiki was created before extensions like FlaggedRevs existed, but even today with these extensions theoretically capable of allowing outside contributions with moderation, there are still relevant and serious concerns about features that are enabled at wikimediafoundation.org, such as allowing raw HTML to be used. Since 2004, a page has existed at Meta-Wiki to allow outsiders to comment and discuss wikimediafoundation.org called "Foundation wiki feedback".[1] In the spirit of being bold, I've taken a number of steps to correct what I view as deficiencies in the current contribution system, all of which I'll outline in this e-mail. If anyone has objections to these changes, they're more than welcome to revert them and we can discuss ways to improve the overall situation.[2] Probably the most noticeable change I made was modifying the "view source" tab and title to "contribute".[3][4][5] There are two ideas behind this change: (1) to encourage people to contribute (whether it's typo fixes, accuracy problems, etc.); and (2) to create a middle ground between "edit" and "view source". It seems unreasonable that a user would ever click "view source" to make a helpful comment about a page, but we don't want to change the tab to something like "edit" if the user doesn't have the necessary permissions to edit the page. The primary entry point to Meta-Wiki's "Foundation wiki feedback" should be through the edit screen, so encouraging users to reach that screen is important. "View source" simply doesn't achieve this goal. The next change I made was to modify the message that users see above the textarea on wikimediafoundation.org if they don't have permission to edit. Rather than the default (bland) messages, I customized the message and made it a bit more colorful and friendlier.[6][7][8] I also included two prominent buttons in the message: one button is to report a problem with that specific page; the other button is to report a problem with the site in general. Clicking either button will load Meta-Wiki's "Foundation wiki feedback" page with a new section and auto-fill the section title. It's also possible to customize the message that users view above the textarea at Meta-Wiki based on whether they're clicking the buttons from wikimediafoundation.org, but I've left that for a later date. Obviously I'm not a great designer, but this is a vast improvement when you compare the before and after pictures: * before: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMFwiki-edit-before.png * after: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMFwiki-edit-after.png Then I headed over to Meta-Wiki to make some changes there. First, I killed the "Foundation wiki feedback/admin" subpage, as it caused confusion, clutter, and was rarely used.[9] I merged all of the header content into the single "Foundation wiki feedback/Header" template and simplified it.[10] I also made the page generally less obnoxious: * before: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FWF-view-before.png * after: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FWF-view-after.png The final changes were to the editnotice above the textarea at Meta-Wiki: * before: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FWF-edit-before.png * after: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FWF-edit-after.png Hopefully these changes will encourage more participation and engagement. In addition to these changes, I've filed a bug in Bugzilla to work on ways to make wikimediafoundation.org more open to outside contributions.[11] MZMcBride [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_wiki_feedback [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discuss_cycle [3] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Viewsource [4] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Viewsourcefor [5] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Vector-view-viewsource [6] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:Contribute [7] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Permissionserrorstext [8] http://wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Permissionserrorstext-withaction [9] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_wiki_feedback/admin [10] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_wiki_feedback/Header [11] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27006