On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:13 PM, Ravishankar <ravidreams(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If the route through Social media is working, why not
try it?
During Tamil Wiki media contest, we found Facebook very useful for
reaching online photographers community.
During TWMC, engagement was built (liking and commenting) and people
started contributing themselves(some posted on FB, later some moved to
commons) after it reached a mass. Though it could have attracted some due
to the $$ tag it had, I don't think everyone contributed due to it. People
wanted their work to be seen by many and hence contributed photos. But yeah
facebook gives huge numbers in terms of getting eyeballs / pageviews and
spreading the word. I would soon be having *some* statistics of pageviews
coming from facebook / twitter into Tamil wikipedia pages through
tawp.in(Shorturl service Yuvi runs for Tamil Wikipedia whose logs I
have access
to), quick look already gave some surprising data. So we can't write off
facebook / social media that easily but using them for teaching how to edit
is completely different thing.
I would look at numbers here in slightly different way. 400 people are part
of a group. Facebook allows anyone in group to add anyone else into the
group even without the person's acceptance. So this is kind of sending 400
invitations out for an outreach. On most of the messages many people in the
group were prodded for attention (@mentioned) and on average "8%" have
replied and participated (made initial edits). This is akin to conducting
the actual outreach. Rentention is something that needs to be seen after a
few months if these users continue to edit voluntarily (having attended an
outreach event).
In all these, I probably don't like the prodding part (in real world I
would compare it to shouting "Wikipedia Wikipedia" (like tea,coffee)
outside the Wikipedia stall), *after most people know* that there is a
stall (group). But am not sure how else it would be possible to attract
attention of people on facebook (which is meant for connecting with friends
primarily).
On the challanges part, I would like to know, how it can be scaled beyond a
person's network. Since people don't join the group by self, amount of
people who can be reached is low and adding random people from friend's
list into group isn't going to help.
Theo, To be fair to OP(Original Poster) , I see the mail only as an update
and didn't seem like any boasting was done.
--
Regards
Srikanth.L