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

[Samuel Klein]

To be clear about what I meant:

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:33 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Samuel Klein wrote:
>> tl;dr:  we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any
>> combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely.
>
> Hmm, prove it. :-)  You talk a good game and I'm not sure you're wrong, but
> I haven't seen much to suggest that you're right.

The design of an effective request / campaign for a certain type of
contribution likely takes a significant amount of time and tweaking,
and a body of people available to respond to the initial interest
generated.


> There was a "contribution campaign" following the most recent fundraiser.

It would be cool to see data from that campaign.


>> what should we ask for first?
>
> Assuming that it's possible to simply ask people to get more involved and
> receive willing, competent volunteers, I think you'd want to start by making
> editing less painful, if the goal is to build (better) free content. Editing
> sucks currently, for a lot of reasons. So you'd need developers who can
> work on solutions to make it suck less. From that, better content and
> contributors flow.

A list of specific "make editing less painful" problems that we know
how to solve but haven't found time to solve yet, pointing to related
bugs/feature requests, might be helpful here.  [do we have the
equivalent of long-term bug reporting for known brokenness on-wiki
that requires policy or process fixes?]

SJ.