On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Joe Sutherland <jsutherland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey all,

I think this has been proposed before on this list, but I'm bringing it up again :)

We could potentially borrow DYK entries from Wikipedia's front page for use on social. Here's some benefits to this:
  • It's cheap, and requires only the avoidance of anything controversial/potentially promotional,
  • It's a good way to keep our social feeds active,
  • Wikipedia articles generally do very well on social media, as Michael can attest, and
  • It's a great way to get more eyes on newly improved articles, which is good for the community.
Some of them might need to be trimmed, but this is a potential one for Facebook as an example:
• that the woman in Vilhelm Hammershøi's Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back is the painter's wife, whom he often painted facing away from the viewer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior_with_Young_Woman_Seen_from_the_Back

What do we think of this? (Forgive me if we already have an answer for this!)

best,
Joe

--
Joe Sutherland
Communications Intern [remote]

While we certainly have discussed it before most of my memory of those discussions ended with comments along the lines of "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". 

Even at the time (a very different time with far less resources in comms which strongly limited what was possible etc) not everyone agreed and some of us (<cough> Matthew Roth and myself </cough>) would randomly flout it by having conversations with people doing twitter quizes etc. Over the past year or so we've also grown not only the comms department but our desire to have a larger social presence and so I think this is a perfect addition to that and a good time to revisit the question.

I was about to list all of the bulleted reasons I think DYK is a good thing to play with and post frequently but you already did that ;) so I'll just agree with all of those (plus that we need to make DYK at least as popular as TIL) .

I wonder if a good way to "Launch" it (we can obviously post some before hand) is a blog post. If we have a nice piece that TALKS about the DYK process: what it actually is and what it represents other then cool facts etc, we can then put into perspective for people (press) and occasionally re-share it either to people who mention us wondering about a DYK we posted or just to remind people.

James




James Alexander
Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation