Is anyone else excited about this idea or is it just me...?
That is an intriguing concept that could indeed work quite well to get
people interested, but how many will remain interested after they
encounter gerrit?
I can't actually say I like this idea a whole lot. Here's why:
* Personal appeals have to be well written in order to work. A poorly written
personal appeal will not actually appeal to someone and may in fact turn them
away.
* We use personal appeals for the fund raising drive. I think using them here
as well, especially when we have these [1] going on every year is a bad idea.
* A personal appeal on a page like this is a wall of text. We need to be very
careful not to elicit the "TL;DR" response from people.
** On a similar vein: This page needs to be fairly appealing in appearance, like
the
MediaWiki.org homepage is, or people will leave.
In my experience, programmers are very practical pragmatic people. I don't
think that a personal appeal is the best way to appeal to them. At least not
how the idea is currently presented. The
Mediawiki.org homepage does a better
job of getting my hyped to use Mediawiki right now.
[1]:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wikipedia-fundraising-campaign