On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 6:55 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a list somewhere of all currently active Foundation initiatives for attracting and retaining active editors? I am only aware of the one project, "Task Recommendations," to try to encourage editors who have made a few edits to make more, described starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JbZ1uWoKEg&t=60m20s
Task recommendations is one nascent initiative that my team is working on.[1] We're still in the very early prototyping and testing stages. (BTW, the whole video segment starts two minutes earlier at about the 58:00 mark.)
Task recommendations is far from the only thing we're doing to attract and retain active editors. Pretty much the entirety of the features development roadmap for desktop and mobile is focused on this problem. VisualEditor, Flow, mobile web and apps work, and more all address this problem from different angles. You can keep up with what the Foundation is doing by checking out the monthly engineering reports.[2]
Is there any evidence at all that anyone in the Foundation is interested in any kind of change which would make non-editors more inclined to edit, or empower editors with social factors which might provide more time, economic power, or other means to enable them to edit more?
We practically can't and don't take on initiatives that directly try to provide more free time or money to editors. We can, however, help people do more with the free time they have, and ask new people to become contributors. Both of those are things we're tackling. A central goal of improving the usability of the core editing experience across devices is to save people time and energy. My team's also trying other things to attract new community members, such as actually inviting people to sign up.[3]
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Task_recommendations 2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/latest 3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition#Invite_users_to_...