First of all, I also think that we cannot expect us to fulfill our mission by having all the world visiting our sites. A good percentage of that mission probably needs to be fulfilled elsewhere thanks to our free licenses and APIs.
On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 11:06 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com
wrote:
We prefer people to read Wikipedia articles on Wikipedia, because a few of them will turn into editors, which they cannot do on any other site (without forking).
Even the idea of the remote contributors needs to be better explored. Our APIs are not only GET, they are also POST. Editing the en.wiki article about Cologne probably must happen in en.wiki itself, but there are many types of contributions that allow for more flexibility and, in fact, might be a lot more successful out of our Click-the-Edit-link paradigm.
https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/ (oh, Magnus Manske was here as well) ;) might be the prehistory of this trend. Binary decisions become useful Wikimedia contributions without the need of instructions or (in some cases) specialized knowledge. Binary decisions and other very simple interactions are at the core of massively successful mobile and/or social games that many of our friends and their kids play.
Meanwhile, people are uploading all kinds of media, crowdsourced translations sentence by sentence are not exotic anymore and, in general, crowd efforts are becoming part of mainstream Internet. Wikipedia actually inspired this trend, showing that even a goal as complex as an encyclopedia could be achieved by us, the people, in our free time, with a pool of small personal investments.
Who will make the connection between Wikimedia's pool of free knowledge and hundreds of possible non-Wikimedia projects that could contribute more free knowledge to Wikimedia? Certainly not us average Wikimedians busy with our watchlists and routines, and certainly not us here discussing with ourselves in wikimedia-l while the World keeps spinning. Hopefully the connections will be made by hundreds of creative minds scratching their own itches and satisfying their own curiosities. But if we don't pitch them the idea of plugging Wikimedia to their experiments and products, who will?
PS: all these discussions are very relevant for https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy and I encourage you to influence the WMF strategy by leaving there your answers and choices about Reach, Community, and Knowledge. Going through the questionnaire took me about 15 minutes and I found the exercise interesting.