[Foundation-l] Can you tell us about ... - An Idea to encourage more edits

[Liam Wyatt]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Andrew Garrett <agarrett at wikimedia.org>wrote:

>
> On 25/11/2009, at 12:00 AM, Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
>
> > We also might want to look into policy overhauls to reduce barriers
> > to contribution.
> > ________________________________
> > From: David Moran <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com>
> > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > Sent: Tue, November 24, 2009 5:53:35 AM
> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Can you tell us about ... - An Idea to
> > encourage more edits
> >
> > I actually like this idea, a LOT.  The main page basically poses
> > Wikipedia
> > as a warehouse of content, which is fine, it is that, but also does
> > little
> > to pose Wikipedia as a collaborative project.  Yeah, new visitors can
> > technically TRY to edit our main page articles now, but generally
> > the stuff
> > that makes it there is already so polished, or so intensely guarded,
> > that
> > neophyte editors have little to no chance of making meaningful edits
> > on
> > them.  I've had a couple articles I created in the Did You Know
> > space, so I
> > can definitely say that they aren't the editor-magnets that Featured
> > Articles or In the News are, but I think putting out there on our
> > front page
> > articles that need CONTRIBUTORS rather than just READERS (in an
> > obvious way,
> > I mean--of course all our articles need contributors) would be a very
> > helpful, and very easy thing for us to do.
>
> In general, redesigning the reader-facing parts of the site to
> encourage contribution is something I strongly support. It will
> benefit us in the long run.
>
> The emphasis at present appears to be on presenting us as a place to
> go to learn and discover things. This is great, but it does not
> necessarily encourage contribution.
>

People interested in things that can be done to encourage a greater
conversion of people to move from "reader" to "editor" might be interested
in watching/reading Erik Moeller's presentation from Wikimania this year. It
was about how to scale up the community to a higher level of magnitude. But
what I really took away from the presentation was the idea of
"micro-transactions" - that is, small easy edits that can be achieved with a
relatively low level of prior knowledge of policies etc. Diversifying and
promoting these micro-transactions are a way to encourage more of our
readers to become involved in more ways than just via the scary "edit" tab.

I'd recommend looking at the slides from this presentation (and watching the
video) from section about "scaling up in 5 steps:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:WMF-Scaling_Up-Wikimania_2009-EM.pdf&page=13


-Liam Wyatt
[[witty lama]]


>
> --
> Andrew Garrett
> agarrett at wikimedia.org
> http://werdn.us/
>
>
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