It's also good to keep in mind that a huge chunk of being part of the communities, is just browsing around the "backstage areas", spending time reading and learning about the ongoing decision-processes, and workflow-processes, and communication styles, and personal tasks that are what keep us moving forward. Stumbling across other editors having/sharing moments of joy, and being inspired by that. Perusing userpages, browsing (layout!) guidelines, skimming villagepumps, checking noticeboards, and investigating backlog piles. http://xkcd.com/214/ doesn't just apply to articles! I had to dabble and explore in a number of areas, before I found regular tasks that I found consistently enjoyable.

[I know a few of the design team already do this a lot, because they ask me questions frequently! (Which I encourage). Reading doesn't leave traces though, so it can be hard for anyone else to get a sense of who is keeping their curiosity burning at both ends. :-) ]

- quiddity

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I don't know the answer to this question, but I do think it is a good one, and I would be in favor of anyone making product decisions being encouraged and given bandwidth to immerse themselves in the product they are making decisions about in it's raw organic form, real active wikis.

I don't edit very much, mostly just on MediaWiki.org to document software. I certainly feel like I would benefit a lot from editing more, and I don't really have any good excuses why I don't. Perhaps I will try spending some time editing while I'm on vacation.

- Trevor

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 5:27 PM, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Hi.

I just spent a few minutes catching up on this mailing list. I noticed
that Nirzar recently joined the design team. That thread seemed very
strange to me. It didn't answer the most basic question: does he actively
edit wikis? And if not, when will he be starting?

This got me thinking about the larger issue. Are people actively editing
the projects? I mean making new pages, fixing typos, updating templates,
etc. on Wikipedia or Wikisource or Commons or another wiki? To me, it
seems like it would be nearly impossible to design well for these projects
without immersing yourself in them. There's so much left to be done, even
on our largest projects such as the English Wikipedia, and I think we're
failing at communicating this. I talk to people who feel Wikipedia is vast
and finished(!), but they're completely wrong.

I think good design is a key component to growing the projects, but I
worry that more and more people are involved in name only. People should
be actively editing and I'm not sure that they are. So I'm left wondering:
are people actively editing? Do people try to reserve a day a week to
editing? An edit a day? How do people get involved so that they can
understand, protect, and enhance the projects?

I should be in San Francisco in late January and I'm hoping to meet with
some of you. Be assured that editing will be a topic of discussion. :-)

MZMcBride

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