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] m: +44 (0) 7722 916 433 | t: @jrbsu http://twitter.com/jrbsu | w: JSutherland https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JSutherland_(WMF)

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 (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur

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] m: +44 (0) 7722 916 433 | t: @jrbsu http://twitter.com/jrbsu | w: JSutherland https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JSutherland_(WMF)

---

Social-media mailing list Social-media@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/social-media

ok, in an attempt to bump this thread to restart conversation (if any) and flag it for Jeff's thoughts I realized that there is no good way to bump the thread because almost every email you'd respond to would have different amounts of context sitting in in the quoted portions and you'd generally just be massively confused if you hadn't seen the full thread ( we were all responding to different people, cutting out/quoting different people etc). So attempting to be as fair as possible i'm just responding to Joe's email and basically restarting it :) Also for the uninitiated among the active participants (which I know includes more then just Jeff but also people like Greg who have been active but not on here then) a tldr (apologies to those who didn' t make the highlights):

- You can read the full thread in the archives starting from here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/social-media/2015-August/003193.html . - Joe emailed out a proposal for using English Wikipedia main page DYKs as a rich source of ongoing information (see above for the good reasoning) - I responded with some history of when we thought about this before (Tilman did as well a bit later) and suggested that we advertise why we're doing it with a 'launch' blog post about the DYK curation process on wiki (which we can then use occasionally to explain the posts). [this was later +1'd by Tilman/Joe/a couple others] - I made an community inside joke about a dark time in the DYK history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-09-24/News_and_notes which Joe, Ed and I then felt the need to explain to everyone. - Discussion amongst everyone about keeping it lean and reusing the already written leads from WP as much as possible and a side discussion talking about what types of stats to use.

James Alexander Manager Trust & Safety Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur