[Foundation-l] Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline

[Pharos]

Hi Brianna,

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Gosh, it would suck if Wikimedia slowly died in the arse because of a
> lack of decent communication tools. That would be tragic, but that
> does seem to be what we are missing. The right tool is like a bullet.
> I don't even have an easy way to, say, contact all the Wikimedians in
> my home city. Sure I can edit a city wikiproject page, and a meetup
> page, but relying on the right people to be watching them is a bloody
> long shot. And that's just people I would probably be familiar with.
> Or I could somehow construct a list of users and then contact a bot
> operator to leave them all a message?... ugh. What if I wanted to
> reach a X-language speaking admin in two different projects? Probably
> impossible. Too much effort in the face of very likely defeat to even
> be worth trying.
> Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.

We've actually been using some tools like this for not-yet-official
Wikimedia New York City on the English Wikipedia.

Here's a fantastic tool for contacting local folks by IP address
called "Geonotice":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice

It's currently not operational, but we have plans to revive it soon.

We've also been putting messages on talk pages by bot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BrownBot

thanks to Cbrown's help.

These may seem like awkward or unusual channels for communication, but
I think we really have to be creative in building broad communities
for local chapter work.

Thanks,
Pharos