[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia blog contributions; make participation invitation more obvious

[Tilman Bayer]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 11:20 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Sarah Stierch wrote:
>> I'm not sure why it was posted on the WMF blog. I'm sure if other
>> countries submitted their top ten's they'd be posted to the WMF blog.
>>
>> Remember: anyone in the movement - around the world - can write a blog
>> for the WMF blog, in any language they want. So do it!
>
> I'm going to fork this thread as I think this point should be highlighted.
>
> Currently, looking at <https://blog.wikimedia.org/>, I'm not sure it's
> obvious at all that anyone in the Wikimedia community is encouraged to draft
> a blog post. As far as I can see, there's no "submit a post" or "contribute
> your own story" or other invitation to participation anywhere on the blog.
>
We installed the public drafting process for the blog a few months ago
and it was a bit of an experiment at first. But yes, now that this has
matured a bit, such a more prominent link on the blog itself sounds
like a great idea - we'll definitely look into it.

By the way, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Drafts is
as much meant as an invitation to copyedit and comment on others'
drafts as it is for submitting new ones; we'd love to see more
participation of both sorts.

> Even adapting the Creative Commons license note in the sidebar might work.
> "This blog is licensed under blah blah. You can submit your own draft of an
> article here!" or something.
>
> I'm as big a fan of security through obscurity as anyone, but it does
> occasionally help to give people a decent pointer to a page such as
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog#Drafting_a_post>. Currently,
> it looks like there _is_ a "Guidelines" link in the sidebar, but it's
> painfully buried in the left-hand sidebar's list of links and its target
> (<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Guidelines>) is a wall of
> text.
>
> I'm not sure who could resolve this issue or how it's best tracked. I guess
> via filing a bug in Bugzilla? If there's a central point of contact for the
> blog, it'd be great to know who that is.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Guidelines#Blog_team
(Guillaume has indeed done most of the work on the blog design in the
past, but nowadays his time for working on the blog is unfortunately
very limited by his other duties.)

We are currently throwing around ideas for a redesign of the whole
blog in a "Newsroom" style, with a stronger emphasis on thematic
sub-blogs and widening participation further. Also, Daniel and I have
recently been talking about the possibility of having the blog in
Labs, which in this case would have enabled you to suggest that
invitation link by just coding it yourself ;)

-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB