On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 3:33 AM, Quim Gil <q...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > I think the core of the problem is how to increase the participation of > tech-curious contributors, and how to structure it in a way that informs, > influences, and actually joins the development process effectively. > > How can we increase the participation in technical matters among Wikimedia > editors and readers? >
Fwiw. My approach for this is based on simple fundamental properties of the interface (which I believe to be responsible for the success of wikis in the first place). Based, at least in part, on my own experience, I believe the key to giving new contributors a path to gradually increasing involvement is <takes a deep breath> to have everything be done by directly editing wiki markup. Seriously. This has been my experience. You start out doing some very simple things like correcting a misspelling. Because you are actually editing the wiki markup, as you correct that spelling error you can see how other wiki markup is structured, that others have written. As you get more involved, from time to time you choose to exercise some slightly more advanced technique you knew was possible, and had some broad notion how to do, because you'd seen that others were doing it, and you'd seen how they did it. And so on. You may notice that this vision of what promotes gradually increased participation is in direct conflict with the idea of Visual Editor. My premise implies that Visual Editor undermines (incidentally, for this thread) the core infrastructural advantage that makes wikis a successful concept. In order to extend this gradual-advancement path into the sharing of community expertise in how to perform technically complicated tasks --- which I see as a major need of all the wikimedian sisters --- I had the idea of creating a set of templates (thus, keeping things within the purview of wiki markup) for adding interactive elements to wiki pages: text boxes, radio buttons, menus, and *buttons* that pass the contents of those text boxes to "actions" that do things with them: feeding them into other pages as input-element content, as template parameters, and as new (or initial) content in page edits. I've been at this for... I guess it's three years now, creating these basic facilities with a mix, under the hood, of wiki markup, javascript, html, and (recently) lua. Although it was obvious from the start this would be most efficiently done as a wiki extension, I reckoned (sorry to be blunt) the development process for wiki extensions was stacked against anything that doesn't cater to central authority's notion of what would most benefit Wikipedia. (Yes I worded that deliberately, though cynically; I've acquired my cynicism by watching what actually gets done over the six or seven years since I got sufficiently involved with wikimedia to notice.) Fwiw, after three years, I'm just about ready to start trying to use my tools for some serious applications; yonder <https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Help:Dialog>. Pi zero _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
