Samuel Klein wrote: > tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any > combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely.
Hmm, prove it. :-) You talk a good game and I'm not sure you're wrong, but I haven't seen much to suggest that you're right. There was a "contribution campaign" following the most recent fundraiser. It was a campaign that was specifically designed to get people involved in editing (in combination with the English Wikipedia's tenth anniversary). Do you have any idea if that had a measurable impact? It's essentially what you're talking about, as far as I can tell. Which is to say, there may already be preliminary evidence that can prove or disprove this theory of yours regarding the "ask and receive" culture that you suggest exists. > what should we ask for first? Assuming that it's possible to simply ask people to get more involved and receive willing, competent volunteers, I think you'd want to start by making editing less painful, if the goal is to build (better) free content. Editing sucks currently, for a lot of reasons. So you'd need developers who can work on solutions to make it suck less. From that, better content and contributors flow. Somewhat tangential to this, Wikimedia needs a tighter focus. It's been quite obvious for the past few years that Wikipedia is the Wikimedia Foundation's primary focus. This is reflected in the way in which Wikimedia generally presents itself nowadays; this was reflected in the "Wikipedia Foundation" fundraising materials; it's reflected in many other places as well. I think it's unfair to the other projects to continue stringing them along, pretending as though one day they'll get the attention they desperately need to grow. Wikimedia needs to refine what it actually wants to be. Rather than trying to do many things and ending up doing none of them well, Wikimedia should focus on doing a few things very well. >> Making bold >> claims like "30% of the entire Internet" is great for Wikipedia advertising > > Is it good for advertising? (advertising what?) I'm not sure if you noticed, but a lot of the Wikimedia Foundation's work has been trying to build the Wikipedia brand. :-) MZMcBride _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l