[Wikimedia-l] "Tweet this page" from some or all sites???

[Tom Morris]

On Thursday, 18 April 2013 at 04:05, Sarah Stierch wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 8:00 PM, James Alexander
> <jalexander at wikimedia.org (mailto:jalexander at wikimedia.org)>wrote:
> 
> > I tend to think that they can be incredibly useful and reader friendly.
> > I've always found it a bit disappointing we don't have it as they are
> > probably the bigger reader request I've ever seen. That said I know that
> > enWiki has had multiple discussions about it ending in failure. The issues
> > mostly seem to stem from the "we're not MySpace" crowd which I think misses
> > the point that we both "are" a social network and that we're an educational
> > site (and should encourage sharing that information) but <sigh>.
> 
> 
> 
> I agree. Readers ask a lot about it, and so do new editors. I think it's so
> lame. Then again, people said the same about the Teahouse (NOTFACEBOOK). I
> wonder if we did a test for it what people would think.
> 
> Talk abou reach - we'd be getting more people to read articles and content,
> which means potentially more people editing.
> 
> But, I'm also a regular Twitter user and I see boosts in viewership for
> anything I post on my Twitter and Facebook. So sick of anti-social media
> Wikipedia. People love to deny we are a social network, when most of us
> involved in the community know that isn't true. A lot of my friends and so
> forth come from the Wikipedia world. If that isn't social media, then I
> don't know what is.


The problem I have is that we lose some independence by doing this. Five years ago, we'd be all about putting MySpace links all over Wikipedia. Today, it'd be Twitter and FB. The services we include will be something we'll constantly be debating. Some hip new startup gets going and we'll have to have a long debate as to whether to add them.

Then if we decided to include, say, Google Plus but not include some other service, we get accused of favouring Google because we're supposedly in cahoots with them in destroying copyright, stabbing babies, bringing on the infoapocalypse and all that. Or we choose services that are only used by Westerners. Or we include every damn service and we end up with those horrible palettes of 2000 different social services. We implicitly waste the time of people who don't use social sharing services or who, say, are trying to undermine the social services by building their own. [1]

Browsers already come with a social media sharing service: it's called copy'n'paste. It doesn't infringe your privacy, it supports all services, allows easy reformatting, 

[1] http://indiewebcamp.com/ Come join in and free yourself from the social media silos! ;-) 

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>