[Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features

[Kirill Lokshin]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Thomas Morton <
morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:

> But perhaps it would be useful to suggest some specific social features
> that you'd want - that might help focus the discussion.
>

I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about adding "social features" in
the abstract -- we're not aiming to build a social network in the real
sense of the term.  Rather, we should be looking at the features that drive
participation at social networks (and particularly at Facebook), whether
those features are an inheret part of the "social network" concept or
merely incidental to it.

Consider, for example, that Zynga and Facebook have successfully managed to
get millions of people to log in at all hours of the night to milk
virtualcows and harvest virtual beans (or whatever it is that people
actually do in Farmville).  Could we do something similar to drive
particpation, particularly in editing areas that don't require
long-duration sessions (e.g. adding or verifying citations, categorizing
articles, etc.)?  Even a few percent of Farmville's user base would be an
order-of-magnitude increase of our own editor base; and if the price for
that is letting these editors display Citationville badges on their user
pages and send each other silly messages, is it not worth it?

Cheers,
Kirill