Jon Robson wrote:
Recently on https://developer.mozilla.org/ I noticed an easter egg when you pop open the JavaScript console.
<snip> "Interested in having a direct impact on hundreds of millions of users? Join Mozilla, and become part of a global community that’s helping to build a brighter future for the Web." <snip>
I'm curious how successful this is but I wonder if we did the same whether we might see some new contributors popping up?
Vaguely related: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T22281 ("MediaWiki needs more easter eggs").
Why don't we have a similar message linking to our mailing list / phabricator instance / mediawiki.org homepage?
We have a "Developers" link at the bottom of MediaWiki-generated pages (index.php?title=) that points to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/How_to_contribute.
There's also talk of building a dev.wikimedia.org (cf. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67074), though I'm still not sold on the virtue of creating yet another portal for developers and other tech-minded people. Additional discussion is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Dev.wikimedia.org.
Thoughts?
Adding easter eggs sounds like a fairly strange recruitment tactic, but I don't see any harm in trying it out and seeing what happens. It's not totally clear to me what problem we're trying to solve here (if any). It's also not completely clear to me whether you want to recruit for the Wikimedia Foundation specifically or for the Wikimedia movement. Depending on the specifics, certain solutions might be more or less appropriate.
MZMcBride