[Foundation-l] leaflets

[Guillaume Paumier]

Hello,

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>  Following a question from a french wikipedian, I visited the page on
>  meta related to leaflets: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet
>
>  Many of these leaflets are outdated. Some never went beyond the draft
>  stage. Some seem to be finished, but were never produced in pdf version.
>
>  Is there anyone willing to help finish some of these leaflets ?
>
>  Of if projects or chapters have other leaflets being done and not listed
>  on this page, can someone complete the meta page ?
>
>  Thanks

It is *very* difficult to make such leaflets. And I do know what I'm
talking about.

Wikipedia leaflets are the easy part. Wikipedia is the biggest project
and quite everybody (including people who make the leaflets) know
quite well how it works. We can do these ourselves (ourselves = people
who make the leaflets = the marketing committee, mainly Elian and me
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Marketing ).

For other wikimedia projects it's quite more complicated. I remember
asking the wikisource community some input last year, because I wanted
to make a leaflet about their project and I didn't know enough about
it myself. As a result, I got 10 times more text than what I asked
for. They gave me an entire step-by-step tutorial ("from the main
page, click on this, then to create an account do this" etc.) which is
definitely not the purpose of a leaflet. A leaflet is what you hand
out in meetings to have people *come* to the website. Its purpose is
to raise the interest.

If people are willing to provide help to promote their project, they
are much welcome. People from the marketing committee will be very
happy to design and produce high-quality documents *once the text is
written (or at least drafted) and a selection of images is ready*.

I have been trying to spread the word that the marketing committee
(especially me) was really at the service of the community to help
people promote their projects and create documents. Unfortunately,
we've had almost no requests. It seems either people don't remember
us, or they are not willing to do some basic work needed before any
design. We can't do everything alone. So let me say it once again: if
you want leaflets, email me, let's discuss what you want exactly, for
what audience, in what format, etc. Then, do the preliminary work by
preparing a clear, concise text on meta: I have organised
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet and all its subpages by
language and by project to make it easier. The design will be the easy
part.

About statistics: we don't have any statistics since Oct. 2006 :
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm . Maybe Greg
Maxwell, as CRO, has more up-to-date data, but stats.wikimedia.org is
currently of no help. It's quite difficult to update leaflets if we
have no new data, given that stats are almost the only thing that
needs to be updated; the rest of the content doesn't need much update:
core principles, free content, are still up-to-date and not likely to
change.

-- 
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you
have imagined." Henry David Thoreau