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

[Samuel Klein]

tl;dr:  we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any
combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely.  what should
we ask for first?


== Herring talk ==

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:50 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>> The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting,
>> but a red herring.
>
> Really, it's a red herring?

Red herrings are real, but only seem to be related to the problem
being solved.  When discussing how to remove barriers to
participation, a premature limiting of what we consider based on
currently-identified resources is a (common) red herring.

Depending on context, the investment of energy into removing barriers
to entry may net additional community resources.  Or it may leave
total 'available' community resources the same, while expanding the
community or changing its balance.


== Tech talk ==

> You're talking about making automated
> anti-vandalism tools and implementing script-assisted tools for clueless
> users. Who do you think writes those tools? While there's a sizeable
> volunteer development base surrounding MediaWiki, most large tech
> projects (AbuseFilter, LiquidThreads, UploadWizard, ResourceLoader,
> etc.)

I love these large projects.  but the ones that make the most
difference to newbies and contributors (AWB, Twinkle, pywb) are often
'small' or bootstrapping projects.

> require paid developers, of which there are precious few.

There's a shortage of core developers.  There are quite a lot of PHP
developers who have built some sort of MediaWiki extension, or
otherwise hacked on it to make their own fork, however.  We have some
opportunities here to recruit more of them as well -- some way of
encouraging each downloader to get involved, or one-click sharing of
their local hacks with a global community?  I'm not sure; but this is
certainly another case of "how can we embrace people who take the
first step to join us" worth solving.


> While it's often overlooked, MediaWiki is the current bedrock of all
> Wikimedia wikis and it clearly does not have an abundance of resources.

A projects-wide campaign to improve mediawiki or attract new technical
contributors would also be a fine idea.


== Grep talk ==

>> 30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month.  We can dream
>
> Visits, but how many of those people contribute? 100,000 "active" users
> out of 400,000,000 million views per month? Is that about right?

This is my point: a significant portion of our readers would be glad
to help Wikipedia, but don't know how.  (possibly half of all readers
never see an 'edit' tab, thanks to semi-protection.  many edit
anonymously.  roughly 10,000 new editors start editing en:wp each
month [over 1/4 the total "active" population!], but most quickly
leave, never even reaching the "10 edits" threshhold for
autoconfirmation on en:wp)

If we create a clear way to help -- for instance, by inviting people
who don't themselves feel they have anything to write to help others
learn how to write effectively -- we will start drawing on a pool of
"actively interested" users who are not editors but have time and
expertise to share.

> Making bold
> claims like "30% of the entire Internet" is great for Wikipedia advertising

Is it good for advertising?  (advertising what?)

I'm simply pointing out what a large, diverse readership means for our
capacity to attract involvement from groups with targeted combinations
of  interest, talent, and availability.

> More channels and tools? Sounds like more development work. Do you
> some secret store of developers? :-)

Often a 'channel' is nothing more than the definition of a project, a
wiki space for trying something new, and a social guideline for what a
group should be doing... a 'tool' can be nothing more than a new
template and a few modified bots.

We should perhaps be training another few hundred editors to maintain
and use bots and client-side scripts (this may be a good channel to
work on; anyone who'se made a thousand edits should get a basic
tutorial in this to help them make routine tasks easier), but I don't
see this as a bottleneck yet.

S