[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Samuel Klein]

I would estimate that we could reach a few thousand new people a day
who are not editors, but would be glad to do something practical to
help wikipedia.   That's my mental baseline for how much support we
could tap if we found a way to match each of those people to something
they wanted to do.

When we put out the call for contribution to the strategic planning
process, we got a couple thousand people who were willing to go
through quite an arduous process to help.  We could easily get ten
times that to do something more down-to-earth.

> It's important that a human listens and there is human interaction...
> it would be awesome to expand the ambassador program and have
> people to help out newbies more.  I don't know how much capacity we
> have but definitely  would like to see that.

So I think this is a question of defining what is needed, more than capacity.

If we put out a public call for 'newbie ambasadors', noting that
experience with editing isn't needed but an interest in learning how
others edit is, and asking people to help mentor new editors (you may
not have anything to edit about, but we will pair you with someone who
does and may be doing it wrong...  help them figure out how!),  I
think we could easily draw in a thousand solid new helpers a month to
a related program.

The question might become one of giving them all something to do every
week, so that they stay involved and interested.

But then MZMcBride could provide them with a constant stream of
clueless editors :)

S.