Tim Starling wrote:
On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
What problem are we trying to solve here?
The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the
number of people who read our content, thus educating more people,
thus better meeting our mission.
You seem to be drawing a very large correlation between social media
sharing and reading (or educating). I think that's a dubious correlation.
The question was what problem are we trying to solve. An appeal to the
Wikimedia Foundation vision statement is clever, particularly as it uses
the word share, but Wikipedia currently has more visitors than nearly
every site on the Internet (cf. <http://www.alexa.com/topsites>). Given
this, I don't buy the argument that's there a need for social media
sharing links, which we've done without for over a decade. Would some
people use and enjoy share icons in the user interface? Yes, of course.
Does that make the investment cost worthwhile? Probably not.
If the answer
is that we want to make it painless to submit
noise into the ether
If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that
gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong
project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it easier.
I think most of Twitter is noise. I think most of Facebook is noise. And
I'm not sure either site would disagree. Many of these social media sites
have operating principles (aggressive user data extraction and
aggregation, sponsored content, etc.) that are in opposition to
Wikimedia's values. So, sure, Wikipedia links would probably be welcome
signal in the seas of noise. That's a clear win for the social media sites
by giving them something of substance: educational content instead of
another paid post, sponsored tweet, or bot spam. The benefit to Wikipedia
still seems tenuous.
Encouraging legitimate content sharing seems like a worthwhile goal, but
it's unclear what that might actually look like. We've discussed features
such as "e-mail this article," but every modern Web browser has this
feature built in and available on any site. Wikimedia could provide a URL
shortener, but those aren't even necessary any longer as Twitter and other
services can just take care of long URLs using their own systems. You said
you were making a proposal earlier in this thread. I'm curious what that
proposal is. A "share" link in the sidebar would probably be more used
that the current (disturbingly prominent) "Print/export" sidebar section,
but I've somewhat lost track of what we're specifically discussing. We're
certainly not going to put Facebook "Like" buttons on every article or do
anything similarly harmful to our users. What, exactly, is being proposed?
MZMcBride