There's an ongoing thread about whether Media wiki should incorporate social media sharing capabilities.
FYI
rexford | google.com/+Nkansahrexford ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Jon Robson" jdlrobson@gmail.com Date: Jan 9, 2015 10:03 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Stance on Social Media To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
There is indeed a mighty debate about this. When we discussed the simple idea of a WikiShare extension to post articles on social media sites - it raised a hell storm that I still have war flashbacks from.
I'm interested in this.
Unlike most sites, we don't provide share buttons that encourage people to share our content. Sure people can still share it, but people can sometimes be lazy. A reddit this, tweet this button, share button might make all the difference.
Are we missing opportunities by not encouraging people to interact with these large social networks e.g. helping them shout about new pages they have created, pages that they wish were better? I mean when I look back to article feedback I wonder why that wasn't implemented as a share button as it would have tapped into an already established market and hopefully brought attention to articles in need of improvement.
What if #editwikipedia became a trending topic on Twitter due to us adding a tweet this page feature to edit mode. Wouldn't this be a good thing? Even at the cost of a share button that could be seen as supporting a non-open site. Why are we not exploring this kind of thing?
In addition to this we don't play well with these sites. For example if you post a link to Wikipedia on any social media website the image that gets shared tends to be the mediawiki.org site (FYI [1]). It probably makes the article on social networks look less appealing and possibly less attention gets drawn to it. Why are we not celebrating the work of our editors more?
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66930
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