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 On 6 August 2015 at 18:16, Ed Erhart &lt;eerhart(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- *Joe Sutherland* Communications Intern [remote] m: +44 (0) 7722 916 433 | t: @jrbsu <http://twitter.com/jrbsu> | w: JSutherland <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JSutherland_(WMF)>

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 &lt;jalexander(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- *Joe Sutherland* Communications Intern [remote] m: +44 (0) 7722 916 433 | t: @jrbsu <http://twitter.com/jrbsu> | w: JSutherland <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JSutherland_(WMF)>

This <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-09-24/News_and_notes> sums it up pretty well, for those on the list without the benefit of context. Sigh. :-) Michael, Andrew, and I also discussed setting up a page where Wikipedians of all languages could come and propose social posts for us that link to articles they've written. I figured that we could adopt the DYK/TIL format for that. --Ed On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 12:33 PM, James Alexander &lt;jalexander(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- Ed Erhart Editorial Intern Wikimedia Foundation

I'm just gonna jump into this really quickly Love all this invested interest in our content curation and distribution btw. : ) Hi Tilman, I remember those days back in 2012, 2013, and even early 2014 when we were doing that. I didn't have access to our accounts then, but I do remember helping you guys draft that sm; I also remember using that meta page and having phased out as well. Such a different time those days.... "This is still true today, but using that logic we should only ever tweet/post about the blog." <- I'm certainly glad this has changed. "Our social platforms are strong but achieve really quite awful engagement at the moment (almost 5 million Facebook likes, yet only something like 50,000 impressions on average). Working on increasing the posting quantity and quality should improve that." My caveat for the above is that, as you may know, our accounts are deliberately slated by Fb's Edgerank algorithm because we are a major brand with a verified account; hence, we have our total reach cut to a very low percentage of what it ought to be (down 90%). Furthermore, if you are to look at our dashboard, our "awful" engagement is being offset by our increased distribution of the content our followers except from official Wikipedia digital properties in the first place: Wikipedia articles. Whereas a bulk of blog content may peak about 1% engagement rate, it is evident by sheer URL clicks (over 7,000 for a Wikipedia article shared last week, whereas the average is about 482 for a post) and people reached (said post reaching nearly 400,000, with 2% engagement). "Impressions" is actually not the right term just a FYI; "Impressions" is referential to the number of times a post is seen on the network, which is the main "reach metric" we have available for us on Twitter. /ducks On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Tilman Bayer &lt;tbayer(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- Michael Guss Research Analyst Wikimediafoundation.org mguss(a)wikimedia.org

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 &lt;mguss(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- *Joe Sutherland* Communications Intern [remote] m: +44 (0) 7722 916 433 | t: @jrbsu <http://twitter.com/jrbsu> | w: JSutherland <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JSutherland_(WMF)>

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 &lt;kmaher(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Joe Sutherland &lt;jsutherland(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Good observation about engagement metrics, but I think that's a separate issue. Not all clicks are equal in terms of impact - it could mean someone who is enticed by one of our tweets to read a blog post that changes their thinking about Wikipedia and its community, or someone who has already seen 2000 Wikipedia articles in their life and now sees the 2001st. Which is the more worthwhile outcome? And it doesn't need to be blog posts; there's a lot of other content (also from elsewhere in the movement) that we can link to and often already do. Just to give another example: we could do much more in terms of posting practical information and insights about Wikipedia for readers (*puts Reading team hat on*), much like the former https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tip_of_the_day but more focussed on the general public. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB