---------- 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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