We also might want to look into policy overhauls to reduce barriers to contribution. ________________________________ From: David Moran <fordmadoxfraud(a)gmail.com> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tue, November 24, 2009 5:53:35 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Can you tell us about ... - An Idea to encourage more edits I actually like this idea, a LOT. The main page basically poses Wikipedia as a warehouse of content, which is fine, it is that, but also does little to pose Wikipedia as a collaborative project. Yeah, new visitors can technically TRY to edit our main page articles now, but generally the stuff that makes it there is already so polished, or so intensely guarded, that neophyte editors have little to no chance of making meaningful edits on them. I've had a couple articles I created in the Did You Know space, so I can definitely say that they aren't the editor-magnets that Featured Articles or In the News are, but I think putting out there on our front page articles that need CONTRIBUTORS rather than just READERS (in an obvious way, I mean--of course all our articles need contributors) would be a very helpful, and very easy thing for us to do. FMF On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de> wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: People interested in things that can be done to encourage a greater conversion of people to move from "reader" to "editor" might be interested in watching/reading Erik Moeller's presentation from Wikimania this year. It was about how to scale up the community to a higher level of magnitude. But what I really took away from the presentation was the idea of "micro-transactions" - that is, small easy edits that can be achieved with a relatively low level of prior knowledge of policies etc. Diversifying and promoting these micro-transactions are a way to encourage more of our readers to become involved in more ways than just via the scary "edit" tab. I'd recommend looking at the slides from this presentation (and watching the video) from section about "scaling up in 5 steps: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:WMF-Scaling_Up-Wikimani… -Liam Wyatt [[witty lama]]

The idea is not bad (especially on wikis that might have more low-hanging fruits), but it might need some work to make it work (e.g. anons cannot create a new article on enwiki, and seeing these red links without the ability to write the articles might be annoying to them). There is something similar on the Recent Changes page of the English Wikipedia, although I'm not sure, that the listed articles (e.g. schlepp effect<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Schlepp_effect&acti… Yiftach-El<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yiftach-El&acti… Shenandoah Conservatory<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shenandoah_Conser… Moldova-Suliţa, Suceava<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moldova-Suli%C5%A3a,_S… Zanze<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zanze&action=edit&am… Gordon-Haus effect<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gordon-Haus_effect&… Yong-Sik Jin<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yong-Sik_Jin&action=ed…) would bring in a very wide audience with diverse expertise. -- Bence Damokos