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

[James Alexander]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:05 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <
psychoslave at culture-libre.org> wrote:

> Le 2013-04-18 05:00, James Alexander a écrit :
>
>  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.
>>
>
> Please provide metrics and numbers. You know how our personal impressions
> are biased with our personal interets. And you also know  how metrics,
> while not providing "absolute truth", assuage our biases.
>  <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>
>


I'm sorry, I don't keep a journal of every reader request I've ever seen or
heard and I didn't try to make any claim of 'absolute truth' I said it was
probably the biggest reader request I had ever seen which I stick by. Want
rough numbers? Amount of people who have personally told it to me, to my
face? In the 100s (over 200 less then a thousand). That I have seen 2nd
hand where they were just commenting somewhere on the internet or in print?
10s of thousands.

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Mathieu Stumpf <
psychoslave at culture-libre.org> wrote:

> ...
>
>
> Ok, but what I don't understand is what prevent them to share links to
> Wikimedia projects?
>
>
At some level? Everything. We have long found that every little extra step
makes it much less likely people will do something. Asking someone to copy
the link and go to their site and paste it (hopefully along with a short
description) means MUCH MUCH less people will do it. This is true even if
that was how they were used to sharing content, however it's even more true
when it is NOT how they are used to sharing content. They are used to
sharing it with buttons and those buttons 'invite' them to share, to spread
the knowledge they found.  That isn't contrary to our goals, in my mind
it's EXACTLY our goals. A book is near useless unless it's read.


>
> Why should be only be building and sharing content within Wikimedia? The
>> vast majority of the consumers of the site could not care one thing about
>> "within Wikimedia", and that is fine. Foisting it upon them is the poor
>> approach :D
>>
>
> I agree. However if people are intending to give feed back on the page,
> especialy feedback which would be useful to improve it, I think it would be
> far better to keep this comments within the Wikimedia echosystem.


Most of this discussion is about sharing in general, not sharing
specifically to give feedback on a page.


I can understand the concern about neutrality, it isn't an easy question
but it isn't something that we are new too. The community makes decisions
like that all of the time. It is, however, the best argument against that
I've tended to hear.Overall I want to make it easy for as many people as
possible to use our information ,and I think sharing buttons can be a huge
help in that direction.


On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Benoit Landry <benoit_landry at hotmail.com>
 wrote:

> I regularly Tweet or (share on Facebook) diff, discussions, articles or
> other pages. I'm not sure an on-wiki button would necessarily augment the
> rate at which I post Wikipedia stuff on my social media accounts...
>
> ~~~~,


I think that's generally true of most wikimedians but not generally true of
most of our readers.

James