Hello,

Sorry for cross-posting a bit, but this is important stuff and can change the way you work as a Wiki/pm/edian, bring you lots of happiness and perhaps even eternal life - how should I know? But let's start where everything starts - with an idea...

It's very easy to come up with ideas for things to do, either as a chapter or as a Wikipedian (or on any other project, but for brevity's sake, let's just say Wikipedia, instead of naming all possible combinations). It's coming up with *original* ideas that's hard. It's really hard. In fact, it's so hard, that whatever idea you have now, it have probably already been tried before. In some instances the result was a failure and only rarely, it was a success. We can learn from both, but what's the fun in that? It's more fun going on to the next idea, thinking that you're the first one to come up with *that* idea and the first one to try to implement it, right?

So, if you're not one of those who think like that, and if you're instead interested in how other ordinary people like you have managed time after time to do magnificent things and then learn from their own mistakes, you should join such dignitaries as Mathias Schindler (who got a total of 350 000 images from two German archives), Frank Schulenburg (who came up with the Wikipedia Academies), John Broughton and Phoebe Ayers (who literally wrote the books on Wikipedia), and plenty of others!

"Join in what?", you wonder. Well, we have called it "Best practices", for short. It's not a project, or a group, or anything like that. This is bigger than that. Our goal is to put together material so that you too can perform miracles in areas such as getting volunteers, holding workshops, getting archives and museums to donate pictures, setting up booths at events and giving presentations about our very favorite wikis. You should join us! You should add what you know about these and other things, and you should then point others to this collection of articles. Let's stop reinventing the wheel and instead put wheels on things noone has put wheels on before. That means, for you who thinks the metaphor is slightly strange, that you should stop reading emails such as this and go to:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Best_practices_in_public_outreach

Let's really make it *Best* practices, shall we? See you there!

Best wishes,

Lennart

Lennart Guldbrandsson, ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Huvudsida

Tfn: 031 - 12 50 48 Mobil: 070 - 207 80 05 Epost: l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com Användarsida: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal Blogg: http://mrchapel.wordpress.com/

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