On Jan 9, 2015 3:24 PM, "Rob Moen" <rm...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > Currently our approach on social media is that "Social media websites > aren't useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and > contributors." [1] I challenge this though. Is it really true? Twitter > has 254 million active monthly users, with 500 million tweets sent per day > [2], Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users users. [3] > > > I know there are many active Wikipedians who frequent both of these sites. > Should we be more actively encouraging people to share? > > > The history of the Social Media page indicates this was added as an ‘initial > dump’ back in November of 2011. [4] But I wonder if it might be worth > revisiting or refreshing this decision in light of the current world we > live in. > > > What do others think? What would the reaction be to a sharethis.com type > service where any site could engage ? Would this be more valuable on > mobile than than desktop? > > > > 1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media > > 2: https://about.twitter.com/company > > 3: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info > > 4: > https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1318877&oldid=458857 >
I think its important to separate two types of social media interaction: *allowing people to post their favourite article (share this links) *meta level interaction (stuff about the community) Nobody objects to the second afaik. The first is like proposing nsfw filters on commmons (ie get ready for the pitchforks). As far as i can tell, the arguments (on enwiki) usually boil down to: *providing a share this link is a tacit endorsement/free advertisement of a website we dont like. Selecting who to show could present neutrality issues *privacy concerns (this is usually a knee jerk reaction. I think that many of our users have some notion that third party cookies and remote javascript loading = bad, without entirely understanding how those things work and not realizing that any proposal would almost certainly not involve the common approach of loading external resources) *contradicting the "serious" tone In my experiance, some wikipedians (esp. On enwiki) feel the wiki should have a very formal tone, and that share this links are out of place. Ive always wondered if thats partially in response to all the "wikipedia is unreliable" talk from academics when 'pedia first became popular causing people to want wikipedia to have a dry academic feel associated with reliability. Anyhow, this list is not the one you have to convince and i believe that historically user opinion has varried significantly from developer opinion on this issue. --bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
