tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely. what should we ask for first?
== Herring talk == On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:50 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: >> The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting, >> but a red herring. > > Really, it's a red herring? Red herrings are real, but only seem to be related to the problem being solved. When discussing how to remove barriers to participation, a premature limiting of what we consider based on currently-identified resources is a (common) red herring. Depending on context, the investment of energy into removing barriers to entry may net additional community resources. Or it may leave total 'available' community resources the same, while expanding the community or changing its balance. == Tech talk == > You're talking about making automated > anti-vandalism tools and implementing script-assisted tools for clueless > users. Who do you think writes those tools? While there's a sizeable > volunteer development base surrounding MediaWiki, most large tech > projects (AbuseFilter, LiquidThreads, UploadWizard, ResourceLoader, > etc.) I love these large projects. but the ones that make the most difference to newbies and contributors (AWB, Twinkle, pywb) are often 'small' or bootstrapping projects. > require paid developers, of which there are precious few. There's a shortage of core developers. There are quite a lot of PHP developers who have built some sort of MediaWiki extension, or otherwise hacked on it to make their own fork, however. We have some opportunities here to recruit more of them as well -- some way of encouraging each downloader to get involved, or one-click sharing of their local hacks with a global community? I'm not sure; but this is certainly another case of "how can we embrace people who take the first step to join us" worth solving. > While it's often overlooked, MediaWiki is the current bedrock of all > Wikimedia wikis and it clearly does not have an abundance of resources. A projects-wide campaign to improve mediawiki or attract new technical contributors would also be a fine idea. == Grep talk == >> 30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month. We can dream > > Visits, but how many of those people contribute? 100,000 "active" users > out of 400,000,000 million views per month? Is that about right? This is my point: a significant portion of our readers would be glad to help Wikipedia, but don't know how. (possibly half of all readers never see an 'edit' tab, thanks to semi-protection. many edit anonymously. roughly 10,000 new editors start editing en:wp each month [over 1/4 the total "active" population!], but most quickly leave, never even reaching the "10 edits" threshhold for autoconfirmation on en:wp) If we create a clear way to help -- for instance, by inviting people who don't themselves feel they have anything to write to help others learn how to write effectively -- we will start drawing on a pool of "actively interested" users who are not editors but have time and expertise to share. > Making bold > claims like "30% of the entire Internet" is great for Wikipedia advertising Is it good for advertising? (advertising what?) I'm simply pointing out what a large, diverse readership means for our capacity to attract involvement from groups with targeted combinations of interest, talent, and availability. > More channels and tools? Sounds like more development work. Do you > some secret store of developers? :-) Often a 'channel' is nothing more than the definition of a project, a wiki space for trying something new, and a social guideline for what a group should be doing... a 'tool' can be nothing more than a new template and a few modified bots. We should perhaps be training another few hundred editors to maintain and use bots and client-side scripts (this may be a good channel to work on; anyone who'se made a thousand edits should get a basic tutorial in this to help them make routine tasks easier), but I don't see this as a bottleneck yet. S _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l