These are good thoughts, Pine! I'm glad you brought them up.
One of my favorite things about our social media in my five months at the
WMF has been reaching people who are enthusiastic about the movement and
eager to connect more.
“Wikipedia is why, even though I spent most of my adult life out of school
as a refugee, when I finally got to a safe place and into a university I
was able not only to compete with my peers, but to excel,” a Facebook user
named Ali who was born in Iraq and now lives in the United States posted on
our page.
We have more than 2 million Facebook followers in the "Global South," and
many are enthusiastic and curious to know more. We have at times asked
people on Facebook to tell us where in the world they are, and the
greetings we get back from around the world
<https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia/posts/10153738165583346> are fantastic.
At the same time, we also hear from editors such as Lilit from Armenia, who
posted: “Wikipedia has become our way of living, the idea which unites all
the editors around the world!”
If Ali and Lilit sound familiar, they were featured on our Wikipedia 15
website <https://15.wikipedia.org/> with these Facebook comments. Reaching
budding Wikipedians is a big part ofour social strategy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media>.
Our verified Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia?fref=ts>, Twitter
<https://twitter.com/Wikipedia> and Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/wikipedia/> accounts are places to showcase our
content and show that it is part of a movement of people.
We need more Wikipedians who enjoy social media and would like to help
guide our accounts. If that's you, I'd love to hear from you.
Jeff Elder
Digital communications manager
Wikimedia Foundation
704-650-4130
@jeffelder <https://twitter.com/JeffElder>
@wikipedia <https://twitter.com/wikipedia>
The Wikimedia blog <https://blog.wikimedia.org/>
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:18 PM, Ed Erhart <eerhart(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Pine,
A big part of our efforts are to humanize the movement, surface our
content, and reach new audiences—research shows that public awareness of
Wikipedia and what it does is not as high as you'd think in emerging
communities.
The blog has been running in-depth and detailed articles like "News on
Wikipedia: Antonin Scalia and the editor tracking his legacy,"[1] "These
Texans are on a quest to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of their state’s
revolution,"[2] and "Fifteen years ago, Wikipedia was a very different
place: Magnus Manske"[3] to showcase our editors and contributors, along
with their contributions to the movement. We plan to continue this in the
coming months.
Our posts that look at article popularity try to go deeper, examining the
editing behind them. Antonin Scalia does that, as does "Millions read Bowie
biography following sudden death."[4] We highlight featured articles
wherever possible.
We also surface fantastic content from our contributors, such as
"Recording romanticism and filling Wikimedia Commons with 19th-century
music"[5] or "Love is strange: ten weird Valentine’s facts from
Wikipedia,"[6] although I freely admit that our social media platforms can
do this far more often than the blog can.
I'm cc'ing Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager, on this email so
that he can talk about his fantastic work on social media. Some of the
comments we get are astounding, and we've started the process of expanding
to new platforms—including Instagram.[7]
Best,
--Ed
[1]
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/17/scalia-wikipedia/
[2]
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/30/improving-wikipedia-texas-revolution/
[3]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/18/fifteen-years-wikipedia-magnus-manske/
[4]
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/28/bowie-death-wikipedia/
[5]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/14/spain-recording-romanticism/
[6]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/12/love-is-strange/
[7]
https://www.instagram.com/wikipedia/
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:33 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
An interesting article in Fortune:
http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/buzzfeed-metrics/. "One of the biggest
challenges in online publishing, Nguyen says, is the continual process of
re-evaluating what criteria the company should be looking at in order to
gauge its effectiveness in reaching an audience, a process that BuzzFeed
calls “re-anchoring.” In effect, it’s an almost scientific approach of
checking to see whether the thing being measured is actually the thing
that
is most important."
While WMF seems to be focused on pageviews for fundraising reasons (and I
would guess that this is also the thinking behind WMF Communications
increasing its staff and budget for social media), I hope that we can
explicitly include off-wiki uses of Wikimedia content in our measures of
impact and success.
Pine
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