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

[Brianna Laugher]

2008/11/3 Pharos <pharosofalexandria at gmail.com>:
> 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.

Oh yeah... that is useful (well it was when it was operational). But I
am not sure it would scale very happily if every meetup used it. And
it only works for location-related notifications. And it doesn't work
cross-project. But, still useful.

> 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.

But how many wikiproject/meetup organisers would know that? It's not
an *insurmountable* task but we sure don't make it easy or obvious.

As with Milos and Robert I think it would work best if communication
tools were built directly into MediaWiki, for best uptake and
effectiveness. But gosh, I'm sure not counting on that happening
within my wiki lifespan. We don't even have a central watchlist. We
don't even have global prefs. The functionality wishlist is so long
that if we are waiting for that to be fulfilled we are definitely
doomed. That is part of why tools built on top of MW (toolserver
tools, javascript gadgets etc) are so important.

Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/