My kneejerk response was to reject this idea, but it's at least worth considering;
Working on wikimedia feels productive because permanent artefacts are produced - articles etc - but these are a direct product of the community around them. Better community tools will produce better outputs and happier contributors. You could even bind it tightly to the editing process, e.g. each article could have a canonical hashtag, and tagged activity could be viewed from a page similar to a talk page.
Also, reading articles is just one way of consuming knowledge; asking questions and receiving answers is another common one. A community of answerers that use wikimedia as their knowledge base could be a powerful way to provide knowledge-as-a-service, and potentially a very healthy counterpart to the existing editor community in terms of reader insights.
Publish/subscribe networks are quite malleable things - look at Quora as a social network with very different community norms - no reason why one couldn't be mission driven.
At the very least, a mastodon instance that could be linked to your wikimedia account might be a positive and realistic step towards this.
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On 9 April 2018 at 20:25, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leinonen@aalto.fi wrote:
On 9 Apr 2018, at 11.28, Peter Southwood <peter.southwood@telkomsa.net< mailto:peter.southwood@telkomsa.net>> wrote:
Why would we want to?
Because we want to "become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”.
How would it further the aims of the movement?
Knowledge is dynamic. Today social media services are the most influential knowledge and belief creation services online. When Wikipedia was started, websites use to hold this position. With Wikimedia social media service, that would rely on the four last of the five pillars[1], I think we could really further the aims of the movement.
How much would it cost?
Hard to say.
Who would run it?
Us.
- Teemu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Leinonen Teemu Sent: 09 April 2018 09:46 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking service ?
Hi,
I have been looking for social networking service that would be fair: not abusing personal data, funded by community, respecting privacy, accepting anonymity, free/libre/ open source etc. Haven’t found many. The Diaspora* Project[1] is not moving forward very fast and the Mastodon[2] is more a microblogging service rather than a social network service.
Would it make sense for Wikimedia movement to build its own social network service?
In the "2017 Movement strategy” we state: “By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. If we consider discussions and information shared on social network services to be “knowledge”, I think we should have a role in here too.
We have 33 million registered users and fulfil all the requirements of being a “fair service”. A minimum list of features to make Wikimedia Social would be:
(1) Status updates (2) Comments (3) Likes (4)Groups maybe: (5) Events
I am pretty sure that by integrating this to other Wikimedia services (Commons etc.) we could achieve something awesome.
- Teemu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:Wikimedia-l@lists. wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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