[WikiEN-l] Developer/Wiki relationship (was: Deployments today)

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Thomas Morton
<morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:

> So the question that this leads me to is this: what can we do to improve
> communication between these two groups. How can we vocalize the communities
> thoughts, ideas and independence. How do we get the creativity and
> versatility of the developers in front of the community.

As far as communication goes, I think the way communication and
publicity occurs on Wikipedia is a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes people
are aware of the sheer size and diversity of Wikipedia, and the need
for adequate communication and discussion of something with notices
left in the right places. But even when something has been widely
publicized and discussed, you will still get people turning up and
saying "I wasn't aware of this" (which is why it is useful to have a
summary of the notifications to point them towards, so they can
realise where they should be paying attention). It doesn't really
apply to developer-community interaction, but an attempt to cover the
spectrum of publicity efforts is here (which I started a while ago):

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

Trouble is, I'm not sure how many people are aware of that advice. I
do get the impression that a lot more of the centralised discussions
get wide participation now, but it is always a balancing act between
publicizing too much and too little (not everything needs lots and
lots of notices). This is best summed up by what the page currently
says: