To refresh memories (or maybe James wasn't around back then), we actually did this kind of SM pretty intensively for about half a year in 2013/14 - including DYKs (mostly custom-crafted by the SM team), but also with "On this Day", Wiktionary words of the day and such. See e.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media/Calendar/2014/01 , https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media/Calendar/2014/02 and surrounding months.
I don't recall a rule that the social media channels could only be used for blog posts. What's true though - and that was also a major factor why that experiment ended: Those custom-crafted SM messages about project content required significant effort to draft and review (even so, we sometimes got called out by followers or community members for inaccuracies, typos etc. that slipped through). And on the other hand, the aim to send them out daily often distracted from the SM promotion of blog posts, which often was lagging for several days during that time or dropped altogether, when we also had less capacity overall.
So I think Joe's first point is spot on, about saving work by reusing the already carefully crafted and reviewed hooks by the ENWP DYK community. It's something I encouraged a few times myself back then (also regarding On This Day), but it wasn't practiced consistently.
Another point we should be aware of is that unlike many other websites that practice this kind of thing on their SM channels, we can't realistically hope to significantly increase the overall readership of Wikipedia through DYK tweets. I'm looking forward to an evaluation of this new experiment (I know that the SM team has made huge strides this year in systematically measuring its impact). But keep in mind that our projects get about half a billion - 500 million - pageviews per day. So even if we have a outrageously successful DYK tweet or FB message that goes viral and achieves, say, 10,000 clicks (back then the best numbers I seem to recall were in the hundreds), that would still be a minuscule increase of 0.002% that day. There may be other benefits, such as gaining followers, but it would be good to try and quantify them too.
On the other hand though, we can make more of a difference for sister projects like Wikivoyage or Wiktionary, which have good content too but much less traffic, and also still lack in brand recognition even among many of our followers. I think it's a fine to tweet interesting Wiktionary Words of the Day, or to highlight the monthly featured topics from Wikivoyage.
Similarly, we also have a much higher potential for noticable impact when it comes to raising awareness and appreciation of the work of editors and the whole movement (i.e. the community behind the content). Therefore a big +1 to James' idea to do a blog post about the DYK process itself.
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
I like this, let's use #DYK.
"too much stuff the social channels are really only useful for blog posts and we don't want to be unprofessional by doing more social stuff that's for those other more commercial organizations". That this was an argument mades me a little sad.
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Joe Sutherland jsutherland@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts Michael! Looks like that Twitter account is a bot, based on its use of ellipses. I think we'd need to curate our output more strictly for obvious reasons, not least for length.
best, Joe
On 6 August 2015 at 19:02, Michael Guss mguss@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello everyone,
Late to the thread, apologies. There has been quite a bit of interest in what I call the "surfacing" of the content from the English Wikipedia homepage as of recent, and I wholeheartedly agree this is a fine idea. Personally, I've been experimenting with our accounts for the reception of "extremely" interesting Wikipedia articles, brought to light by the wonderful people at the Wikipedia subreddit and the Cool Freaks Wikipedia group, and some other sources (which pass the test of being non-offensive, culturally insensitive, or anything which would render a nasty media mention, etc.). That said, I believe we have some "competition" on Twitter with an account called "Wikipedia's DYK" - this is ran by a community member?
The #DidYouKnow is mostly them, but #DYK is far more popular. But that's Twitter.
The editorial curation will need to be figured out I think. Ed, Joe, Andrew myself are working on that, but we invite everyone to offer their opinion, suggestions, comments, insights!
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:33 AM, James Alexander jalexander@wikimedia.org wrote:
Heh, fair point there was a lot of context missing there ;)
For the record I'm all in favor, and I was doing a cheap joke for the entertainment of those who knew the history :)
The worst problems are usually something that we will have on our radar, these articles are not hard to quickly review, and the community IS actually very good at reviewing these. When there are DYKs we're not interested in sharing there is no issue skipping them, there are 24 a day :) it's not like we're going to run out.
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Joe Sutherland jsutherland@wikimedia.org wrote:
Okay, fair point. In fairness I think something like that's unlikely to happen in the future :P
(For context for those unaware, he's talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibraltarpedia ... think this may have been pre-Katherine :) )
On 6 August 2015 at 18:26, James Alexander jalexander@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:16 AM, Joe Sutherland jsutherland@wikimedia.org wrote: > > It's gotten a lot better in fairness. Checking the article isn't > awful before we publish it on social is also pretty trivial, thankfully. > > Joe
Yes.... Yes it has....
BUT DYK that Gibraltar was ceded to Britain "in perpetuity" under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713?
/Ducks/
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