[Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features

[Bod Notbod]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 09:04, Jan Kučera <kozuch82 at gmail.com> wrote:

> people in the community still think
> commercial/noncomemrcial are two different worlds - they arent. There
> is only one user, who actually does not care a lot about a site being
> commercial/uncommercial...

I'm going to assume that by "user" you're primarily talking about our
readers rather than regular contributors.

I think it's difficult to estimate whether they care that the site is
"uncommercial". We don't have a test-wiki or a competing site that
shows ads and is funded by those. Who can say with confidence that if
there was an ad-funded Wikipedia that users wouldn't flee? So we can't
know if they care or not.

> if you have bad software you will
> never have great content...

Which raises the question: are you saying Wikipedia content is bad?
Wikipedia's position in the most visited websites would appear to say
that users disagree with you.

> The example can be myself - I am missing chart features withint
> MediaWiki/Wikipedia, I filled a bug, nothing happens, I may leave the
> community for good... This is the same story over and over again.
> Foundation did not really care till now...

I too have a long outstanding feature request to do with improving
watchlists (grouping pages together so you could have eg a soccer
watchlist and a politics watchlist). I put out a plea some years ago
and it looks like it may finally happen as someone on the Google
Summer of Code program is going to give it his best shot this summer.

Instead of leaving the project why not try and form a relationship
with some programmers and nudge them towards working on your
idea/needs? Be the squeaky wheel looking to be oiled. And be patient.
If you can't achieve what you want due to missing features at the
moment, surely there are other things you can contribute that you
would find fulfilling?

The fact that my watchlist doesn't have the functionality I desire has
meant that I haven't used my watchlist much, but there's still 1,001
things to do that have nothing to do with a watchlist.

Bodnotbod