Hi Erik,
On 06/12/12 00:03, Erik Moeller wrote:
I'm curious what folks here think about making some noise about the two most recent additions to the Wikimedia family around January or February.
Great Idea!
Wikivoyage is still finishing up the beta phase (image transfers, logo import etc.) this month, and Wikidata isn't live as a repository yet -- but we could set a target date that would work for both projects.
I do not know the state of WikiVoyage but congratulations to the team of Wikivoyage.
Form Wikidata I do not think that this will make much sense. Most of the people working on Wikipedia know about Wikidata, but the pure "consumers" do not know about it.
At the moment those would probably think, "Nice way to combine articles across different Wikipedias". But they do not see the real potential of Wikidata. Having those centralized interlanguage-links is really great but most people do not see the difference.
What I'm imagining is an actual banner on Wikimedia projects announcing the launch of both Wikivoyage and Wikidata, pointing to a landing page explaining what these projects are, how to participate, etc. That page could be drafted on Meta. Then interested folks would visit the projects to learn more and get involved.
This will be great for Wikivoyage, but not for Wikidata. There the folk's job is testing of the software not participating data.
Wikimedia projects obviously have an enormous reach and I think this could help create awareness and build community -- but it could also be an unwelcome influx in the early stages. This could be regulated by running a banner only for logged in users, or x% of readers.
I assume most of the logged in users already know about the two projects. So the wikivoyage banner could be shown to a percentage of pure consumers by January or February.
For Wikidata I would suggest to do that a bit later, maybe April/May?
Thoughts?
All in all: Great idea – for Wikidata maybe a bit to early?
BTW: I never came to the idea mentioning Wikivoyage and Wikidata in on sentense. ;-)
Marco