Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1] I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am...
2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1]
Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to be) the original content.
Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they are useless?
Strainu
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am... _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
And if we're digging in the history, let's also publicly shame the culprit, User:DroneOfTheWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1041046&am...
Strainu
2015-01-09 21:59 GMT+02:00 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1]
Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to be) the original content.
Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they are useless?
Strainu
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am... _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 2015-01-09 11:59 AM, Strainu wrote:
2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1]
Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to be) the original content.
Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they are useless?
Strainu
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
DroneOfTheWiki made 2 vandalism edits, NicoV undid one https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&oldid=1041046 but missed the other https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&oldid=1039082.
I undid the remaining vandalism edit.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
In my opinion, we've been at odds with social media because...
1. social media contributions are rarely the kinds of contributions we desire and; 2. social media websites often operate in ways that conflict with our values and; 3. social media behaviors are not often seen has helpful to our mission.
I've not yet heard a persuasive idea about how we can integrate with, or become more similar to, social media sites that overcomes these issues. But I do intend to remain open minded.
- Trevor
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Daniel Friesen daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
On 2015-01-09 11:59 AM, Strainu wrote:
2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1]
Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to be) the original content.
Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they are useless?
Strainu
[5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236 DroneOfTheWiki made 2 vandalism edits, NicoV undid one < https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&o...
but missed the other < https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&o...
.
I undid the remaining vandalism edit.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 15-01-09 03:19 PM, Trevor Parscal wrote:
3. social media behaviors are not often seen has helpful to our mission.
That's a near-universal attitude amongst "old hands"; and has spawned a number of "We are not Facebook" meme and a great deal of knee-jerk reaction to any feature that can even vaguely be associated with social media...
But I wonder how true that actually is. Did the Thanks feature get generally positive results, for instance?
I hear a lot of "we don't want social media features" thrown around but nary an explanation of /why/ that would be beyond handwaving about how bad they are in respect to our mission.
-- Marc
Il 09/01/2015 20:59, Strainu ha scritto:
2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1]
Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to be) the original content.
Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they are useless?
Strainu
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
Thanks, that was indeed vandalism. I've reverted https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1348763 one of the malicious changes.
I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am... _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I'd say: hit social media! Make MediaWiki and Wikimedia look like a *happening place*.
Everyone [*] who runs PHP is looking seriously at HHVM right now, and that's entirely because WMF moved to it.
The Phabricator migration made it to lwn.net, which is low-traffic but high-quality.
Basically, cool stuff happens around here and it needs to be blogged and tweeted and facebooked and HNed and Reddited assiduously. This will lure more brilliant people in to work on the cool stuff that makes the world a better place.
- d.
[*] ymmv
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.
Personally, I think the arguments against at least the ability to easily share articles on social media are dwindling in logic and effect as more time passes. It seems unlikely to me that enWP will adopt it first - but I think it's possible that other project wikis may. There are some that already essentially do this using templates. I continue to believe that an extension solution remains preferable - and will once again offer to work on that if there is indeed a desire. The last few times the end results on if it was worth the time were mixed.
-greg aka varnent
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:21 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I'd say: hit social media! Make MediaWiki and Wikimedia look like a *happening place*.
Everyone [*] who runs PHP is looking seriously at HHVM right now, and that's entirely because WMF moved to it.
The Phabricator migration made it to lwn.net, which is low-traffic but high-quality.
Basically, cool stuff happens around here and it needs to be blogged and tweeted and facebooked and HNed and Reddited assiduously. This will lure more brilliant people in to work on the cool stuff that makes the world a better place.
- d.
[*] ymmv
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I would like to see more social media features in mediawiki. You can flame me off-list, I'm just registering an opinion.
I think we also need to maintain our core competency -- WMF should not be building a twitter or facebook or google plus clone, clearly. But social features built around the needs of editors to collaboratively build a wiki are apropos.
IMNSHO. --scott
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?
On Jan 9, 2015 3:24 PM, "Rob Moen" rmoen@wikimedia.org wrote:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1] I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an
‘initial
dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am...
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction: *allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
As far as i can tell, the arguments (on enwiki) usually boil down to: *providing a share this link is a tacit endorsement/free advertisement of a website we dont like. Selecting who to show could present neutrality issues *privacy concerns (this is usually a knee jerk reaction. I think that many of our users have some notion that third party cookies and remote javascript loading = bad, without entirely understanding how those things work and not realizing that any proposal would almost certainly not involve the common approach of loading external resources) *contradicting the "serious" tone In my experiance, some wikipedians (esp. On enwiki) feel the wiki should have a very formal tone, and that share this links are out of place. Ive always wondered if thats partially in response to all the "wikipedia is unreliable" talk from academics when 'pedia first became popular causing people to want wikipedia to have a dry academic feel associated with reliability.
Anyhow, this list is not the one you have to convince and i believe that historically user opinion has varried significantly from developer opinion on this issue.
--bawolff
Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction: *allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post that Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies of her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!" accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
KWW
As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to abuse it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning that new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to your example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about our favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that bad? Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now, there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction:
*allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post that Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies of her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!" accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
KWW
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:01:
As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to abuse it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning that new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to your example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about our favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that bad? Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now, there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.
Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
KWW
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction:
*allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post that Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies of her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!" accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
KWW
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I'd be really interested knowing how our inbound referral traffic from social sites differs from that from inbound traffic to social and news sites from social referral traffic. When we talk about reader decline, we rarely talk about how much a small increase in social referrals could offset that.
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M +1 415 609 4043 \ @jaredzimmerman http://loo.ms/g0
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:01:
As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to abuse it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning that new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to your example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about our favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that bad? Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now, there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.
Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
KWW
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction:
*allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post
that Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies of her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!" accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
KWW
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 9 January 2015 at 15:26, Jared Zimmerman jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd be really interested knowing how our inbound referral traffic from social sites differs from that from inbound traffic to social and news sites from social referral traffic. When we talk about reader decline, we rarely talk about how much a small increase in social referrals could offset that.
Tweet a Fact functionality may be able to answer some of these questions; there is a ?source=app appended to the URL so we can see what kind of traffic these shares are driving.
Dan
Our referral traffic for 10/13 - 10/14 months follows. It's heavily weighted towards seach. There are some industry wide issues about identifying referrals from Facebook and Twitter's mobile apps which probably underestimate the numbers but it seems like we have some room to improve here.
According to this report from Buzzfeed[1], social and search referrals (the way the industry thinks about referrals) are about even (around a third of traffic each) in 2014. When I was at Yahoo a few years ago, social was just starting to approach search so this seems reasonable.
-Toby
Wikipedia Referral Traffic (10/13 - 10/14)[2]
Other
84,951,586,000.00
78,603,395,000.00
Internal
73,696,896,000.00
Yahoo
4,756,204,000.00
Yandex
1,951,328,000.00
Bing
1,939,456,000.00
Baidu
569,554,000.00
328,492,000.00
Naver
319,629,000.00
Ask
271,658,000.00
260,840,000.00
190,642,000.00
Sogou
101,626,000.00
Seznam
97,720,000.00
DuckDuckGo
80,658,000.00
Daum
69,569,000.00
AOL
67,526,000.00
Startpage
56,814,000.00
[1] http://insights.buzzfeed.com/industry-trends-2014/ [2] data assembled for readership report, 12/14 from http://pentaho.wmflabs.org/pentaho/Home
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Jared Zimmerman < jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I'd be really interested knowing how our inbound referral traffic from social sites differs from that from inbound traffic to social and news sites from social referral traffic. When we talk about reader decline, we rarely talk about how much a small increase in social referrals could offset that.
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M +1 415 609 4043 \ @jaredzimmerman http://loo.ms/g0
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:01:
As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to
abuse
it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning
that
new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to
your
example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about our favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that bad? Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now, there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.
Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I
will
shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors
and
we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
KWW
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction:
*allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post
that Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion
copies
of her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!" accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
KWW
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
Since when an inflow of new editors is a bad thing? Of course, not all newbies will become productive editors, but if we start outright potential new people, we will end up with Wikipedia ran by three grumpy cats. See Citizendium for an example of a wiki that failed because it couldn't maintain a stream of new contributors as old ones were leaving.
Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:41:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
Since when an inflow of new editors is a bad thing? Of course, not all newbies will become productive editors, but if we start outright potential new people, we will end up with Wikipedia ran by three grumpy cats. See Citizendium for an example of a wiki that failed because it couldn't maintain a stream of new contributors as old ones were leaving.
Who said an inflow was a bad thing? It's not. A surge all focused on one particular topic is a bad thing, a random distribution focused on a random group of topics is a good thing.
KWW
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote: [...]
As far as i can tell, the arguments (on enwiki) usually boil down to: *providing a share this link is a tacit endorsement/free advertisement of a website we dont like. Selecting who to show could present neutrality issues
Exactly. This is the primary divisive aspect. * Do we include links to Everyone Who Asks? (There are dozens of options at http://www.sharethis.com/get-sharing-tools/ and ending up with http://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png at the top of every page is the fear of many editors. We've seen those sites that end every blog post with a massive line of share-icons... It's aesthetically ugly, because the icons are all a mishmash of styles.) So, What Criteria would we use, to select the services that are given this significant endorsement? * Do we display All Links At Once (if there are a lot)? or just a few by default and the rest in an expanding section? * Do we select the same services globally, or let each language pick their own preferences? (e.g. Sina Weibo, QQ, Viber, etc). These issues are ripe for argument, which is one reason we avoid it altogether.
The* icons *are the second most divisive aspect. The proponents generally want to use or include the services' icons, because those are the most recognizable (and briefest, which is good!) way to link to them. But those icons are not CC-BY-SA (I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I recall it being mentioned). And they're VERY eyecatching/distracting, in our generally plain-text reading UI, which is the strongest objection.
I personally think that adding text-links (no icons) would be a reasonable step forward. That is what the Indonesian Wikipedia has done. I think a few other wikimedia wikis also include share links, in either the sidebar or the header?
All the existing extensions and scripts, and the few wikimedia wikis that already have some sort of "share" button, are (or should be) included at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media_plugins That is probably the best place to summarize the pros/cons, and to list the past discussions, and the technical options.
[...]
Anyhow, this list is not the one you have to convince and i believe that historically user opinion has varried significantly from developer opinion on this issue.
+1
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:27 PM, quiddity pandiculation@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote: [...]
As far as i can tell, the arguments (on enwiki) usually boil down to: *providing a share this link is a tacit endorsement/free advertisement of a website we dont like. Selecting who to show could present neutrality issues
Exactly. This is the primary divisive aspect.
- Do we include links to Everyone Who Asks?
What if we used Wikidata and had an open form of sharing? I could imagine us asking Wikidata what things are instance of sharing platforms and what the URL for them. Using something like OOJS UI's InputLookupWidget you could allow users to search for their preferred service in this category.
We could then keep track for a given user their preferred services.
This means we would be completely neutral. It could also be a bit of a game changer in the open web. Maybe we could revive http://webintents.org/ using Wikidata?
On 10 jan. 2015, at 02:10, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
What if we used Wikidata and had an open form of sharing? I could imagine us asking Wikidata what things are instance of sharing platforms and what the URL for them. Using something like OOJS UI's InputLookupWidget you could allow users to search for their preferred service in this category.
We could then keep track for a given user their preferred services.
This means we would be completely neutral. It could also be a bit of a game changer in the open web. Maybe we could revive http://webintents.org/ using Wikidata?
I’ve dabbled quite a bit in this topic, and with the exception of using wikidata as the data platform to query from (which wasn’t around a few years ago), this is exactly how I always envisioned this could and should work for wikipedia.
But we simply never had time to build a neutral sharing platform that was usable for Wikipedia. Perhaps now with so much more infrastructure in place, it would be doable.
DJ
I smell another Jon/thedj/aude collaboration coming up... :) On 10 Jan 2015 02:27, "Derk-Jan Hartman" d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com wrote:
On 10 jan. 2015, at 02:10, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
What if we used Wikidata and had an open form of sharing? I could imagine us asking Wikidata what things are instance of sharing platforms and what the URL for them. Using something like OOJS UI's InputLookupWidget you could allow users to search for their preferred service in this category.
We could then keep track for a given user their preferred services.
This means we would be completely neutral. It could also be a bit of a game changer in the open web. Maybe we could revive http://webintents.org/ using Wikidata?
I’ve dabbled quite a bit in this topic, and with the exception of using wikidata as the data platform to query from (which wasn’t around a few years ago), this is exactly how I always envisioned this could and should work for wikipedia.
But we simply never had time to build a neutral sharing platform that was usable for Wikipedia. Perhaps now with so much more infrastructure in place, it would be doable.
DJ _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 10/01/15 09:17, Brian Wolff wrote:
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction: *allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community)
Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks).
Hmmm, IIRC I did actually propose NSFW filters on Commons at one point. I'll happily propose this one too.
As far as i can tell, the arguments (on enwiki) usually boil down to: *providing a share this link is a tacit endorsement/free advertisement of a website we dont like. Selecting who to show could present neutrality issues
Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
*privacy concerns (this is usually a knee jerk reaction. I think that many of our users have some notion that third party cookies and remote javascript loading = bad, without entirely understanding how those things work and not realizing that any proposal would almost certainly not involve the common approach of loading external resources)
By the same argument, we should probably ban all external links.
*contradicting the "serious" tone In my experiance, some wikipedians (esp. On enwiki) feel the wiki should have a very formal tone, and that share this links are out of place. Ive always wondered if thats partially in response to all the "wikipedia is unreliable" talk from academics when 'pedia first became popular causing people to want wikipedia to have a dry academic feel associated with reliability.
Surely this is an untenable argument now that the websites of so many scientific journals have share links? e.g.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/65/6/1721.abstract
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png or equivalent on our sites. Such a mess of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page on Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a colorful icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
MZMcBride
On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 9:35 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my opinion.
I'm in the "eh" camp, but I also don't think it's that much pain if done properly. This article sums it up pretty well: http://exisweb.net/truth-about-share-buttons
There's a lot of interesting stuff to parse on that page (much of which I've admittedly skimmed, because "eh"). The conclusion: "If a page is shared, it’s not due to share buttons, but because it is useful and interesting. However, if well thought out and integrated with the site, social buttons can be beneficial in a small way."
Rob
Hoi, The great thing of personal opinion is that they make great arguments, they have their point When they are presented well they are compelling.. HOWEVER, we are in the habit of testing many of these arguments.
This is a test that is bound to be interesting to many of us. Thanks, GerardM
On 12 January 2015 at 06:35, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png or equivalent on our sites. Such a mess of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page on Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a colorful icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
MZMcBride
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Your help pushing these tasks to some direction is welcome:
"Share" button (tools) in Wikipedia https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T29027
enhancement - add social sharing feature after upload https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T42456
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The great thing of personal opinion is that they make great arguments, they have their point When they are presented well they are compelling.. HOWEVER, we are in the habit of testing many of these arguments.
This is a test that is bound to be interesting to many of us. Thanks, GerardM
On 12 January 2015 at 06:35, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png or equivalent on our sites. Such a
mess
of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page
on
Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to
submit
noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a
colorful
icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
MZMcBride
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Assuming that we even use icons! I think a text drop down box which lists the various networks that one could share onto would work just as well.
On 12 January 2015 at 15:35, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png or equivalent on our sites. Such a mess of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page on Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a colorful icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
MZMcBride
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
What problem are we trying to solve here?
The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the number of people who read our content, thus educating more people, thus better meeting our mission.
If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit noise into the ether
If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it easier.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
What problem are we trying to solve here?
The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the number of people who read our content, thus educating more people, thus better meeting our mission.
You seem to be drawing a very large correlation between social media sharing and reading (or educating). I think that's a dubious correlation.
The question was what problem are we trying to solve. An appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation vision statement is clever, particularly as it uses the word share, but Wikipedia currently has more visitors than nearly every site on the Internet (cf. http://www.alexa.com/topsites). Given this, I don't buy the argument that's there a need for social media sharing links, which we've done without for over a decade. Would some people use and enjoy share icons in the user interface? Yes, of course. Does that make the investment cost worthwhile? Probably not.
If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit noise into the ether
If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it easier.
I think most of Twitter is noise. I think most of Facebook is noise. And I'm not sure either site would disagree. Many of these social media sites have operating principles (aggressive user data extraction and aggregation, sponsored content, etc.) that are in opposition to Wikimedia's values. So, sure, Wikipedia links would probably be welcome signal in the seas of noise. That's a clear win for the social media sites by giving them something of substance: educational content instead of another paid post, sponsored tweet, or bot spam. The benefit to Wikipedia still seems tenuous.
Encouraging legitimate content sharing seems like a worthwhile goal, but it's unclear what that might actually look like. We've discussed features such as "e-mail this article," but every modern Web browser has this feature built in and available on any site. Wikimedia could provide a URL shortener, but those aren't even necessary any longer as Twitter and other services can just take care of long URLs using their own systems. You said you were making a proposal earlier in this thread. I'm curious what that proposal is. A "share" link in the sidebar would probably be more used that the current (disturbingly prominent) "Print/export" sidebar section, but I've somewhat lost track of what we're specifically discussing. We're certainly not going to put Facebook "Like" buttons on every article or do anything similarly harmful to our users. What, exactly, is being proposed?
MZMcBride
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 2:45 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
The question was what problem are we trying to solve. An appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation vision statement is clever, particularly as it uses the word share, but Wikipedia currently has more visitors than nearly every site on the Internet
Note that this is more true for the top five Wikipedias than for the hundreds of other Wikimedia projects.
I think most of Twitter is noise. I think most of Facebook is noise.
Wikimedia is signal. Social media services are used by millions covering the kind of online diversity we are aiming for. Do we want to recruit new editors in that diversity or not? If we do, there we can find millions of users with the time, the equipment, and the basic education needed to do so.
Here's perhaps a new way to think about social media. Let's focus on one particular aspect of "not noise": news.
Twitter is a powerful tool for collecting/spreading real time news. It also has many disadvantages, as we all know.
We have wikinews and other real-time information sources in our project (including real-time edits to pages during big events, such as the Olympics or Dancing With The Stars).
Why can't we work on integrating these better, so that when you are an eyewitness with first-hand knowledge contributing to WikiNews is at least as powerful/useful as tweeting? Perhaps integrating twitter and flow (or something even more radical) to make this work really well.
If people either get in the habit of using wikinews instead of twitter and/or wikinews becomes a powerful place to collect and filter tweets on a topic (think of https://storify.com/ for inspiration), we can further our educational goals, provide a "trusted" source for news that can be edited/vetted/archived and eliminate the echo chamber of misinformation which plagues twitter and facebook. We also help produce new editors who are generating content for our sites in the process of documenting and vetting first-hand sources during important events.
In my view, this is a more radical radical to think about social media. Not blindly trying to increase a "number of shares" metric, but trying to make our project an integral part of how the fact-based social experience works.
Ideally, this integration with real-time content would be bidirectional: real-time sources can be seamlessly incorporated into wikipedia articles where appropriate, and in the other direction quoting and sharing relevant wikipedia articles (or wikisource or wikiversity content, etc) in conversations in your extended social network would be facilitated for answering questions/filling in context/settling bar bets. This starts to look more like a wikipedia-enabled twitter client (or a twitter-enabled wikipedia) than a set of share icons. --scott
Tim, I have to disagree on that.
Imagine a world in which every single human being /can/ freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
Most social media users can already read Wikipedia (and, I suppose, many Wikipedia readers cannot use social media because of censorship). And they almost surely know Wikipedia. "Inviting" them to visit the site does not bring us closer to our mission. Instead, why doesn't the Foundation focus on bringing the ability to access our projects in places where they would be useful but cannot really be used? (Africa?)
Il 12/01/2015 10:22, Tim Starling ha scritto:
On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
What problem are we trying to solve here?
The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the number of people who read our content, thus educating more people, thus better meeting our mission.
If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit noise into the ether
If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it easier.
-- Tim Starling
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Starling" tstarling@wikimedia.org
*contradicting the "serious" tone In my experiance, some wikipedians (esp. On enwiki) feel the wiki should have a very formal tone, and that share this links are out of place. Ive always wondered if thats partially in response to all the "wikipedia is unreliable" talk from academics when 'pedia first became popular causing people to want wikipedia to have a dry academic feel associated with reliability.
Surely this is an untenable argument now that the websites of so many scientific journals have share links? e.g.
I personally attribute that to "we're so small, we have to cave on this point or no one will know we're here", a problem a small journal might have, but which Wikipedia certainly does not.
I'm on the "don't bother" side, for nearly all the reasons previously enumerated.
Cheers, -- jra
On 12/01/15 17:11, Jay Ashworth wrote:
I personally attribute that to "we're so small, we have to cave on this point or no one will know we're here", a problem a small journal might have, but which Wikipedia certainly does not.
Do you suppose Physical Review (the lumbering giant of physics publishing) has that problem?
http://journals.aps.org/prb/accepted/99078Yc6K231ec4c06a66cd9e85c6575ddf278adc
Or PLOS ONE?
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0107794
Or Philosophical Transactions A?
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2035/20140347
All have share links.
-- Tim Starling
If you're interested, the Wikipedia app has functionality which lets you share interesting snippets of articles to the social medium of your choice. We have special "Tweet a Fact" functionality in alpha on Android; when you highlight text in the app, and you tap the little chat bubble in the menu, it creates a bitmap and posts it to the social medium of your choice.
Here's an example of what it's like if you do it on the Bern article: https://twitter.com/danjgarry/status/553689032455360512
The Android and iOS SDKs include a lot of functionality for this kind of social sharing since it's an established user workflow for mobile apps. It's relatively easy for us to build this out.
You can test the Android alpha by going to http://android-builds.wmflabs.org on your Android device and downloading the APK.
Dan
On 9 January 2015 at 11:24, Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org wrote:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1] I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am... _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Rob, thank you for this post and the discussion it has started, and thank you also for detecting (indirectly) a relative subtle piece of vandalism in our mw:Social_media page.
There are many mixed topics here, and solving each requires many more mixed tasks. I have picked the one that our Engineering Community team is directly responsible for, and I have created an epic task for it:
mediawiki.org news distributed to social media and Wikimedia tech blog https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86437
I went into some details and probably made some assumptions; everything is editable. :)
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Rob Moen rmoen@wikimedia.org wrote:
Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors." [1] I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3]
I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. Should we be more actively encouraging people to share?
The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we live in.
What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on mobile than than desktop?
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
2: https://about.twitter.com/company
3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info
4:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&am... _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org