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