Mailing List Archive

Stance on Social Media
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
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen <rmoen@wikimedia.org>:
> 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]

Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to
be) the original content.

Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they
are useless?

Strainu

[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236



> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
And if we're digging in the history, let's also publicly shame the
culprit, User:DroneOfTheWiki:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1041046&oldid=1038651


Strainu

2015-01-09 21:59 GMT+02:00 Strainu <strainu10@gmail.com>:
> 2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen <rmoen@wikimedia.org>:
>> 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]
>
> Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to
> be) the original content.
>
> Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they
> are useless?
>
> Strainu
>
> [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
>
>
>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On 2015-01-09 11:59 AM, Strainu wrote:
> 2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen <rmoen@wikimedia.org>:
>> 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]
> Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to
> be) the original content.
>
> Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they
> are useless?
>
> Strainu
>
> [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
DroneOfTheWiki made 2 vandalism edits, NicoV undid one
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&oldid=1041046>
but missed the other
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&oldid=1039082>.

I undid the remaining vandalism edit.

~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Il 09/01/2015 20:59, Strainu ha scritto:
> 2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen <rmoen@wikimedia.org>:
>> 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]
> Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to
> be) the original content.
>
> Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they
> are useless?
>
> Strainu
>
> [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
>
Thanks, that was indeed vandalism. I've reverted
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=1348763>
one of the malicious changes.
>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
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> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
In my opinion, we've been at odds with social media because...

1. social media contributions are rarely the kinds of contributions we
desire and;
2. social media websites often operate in ways that conflict with our
values and;
3. social media behaviors are not often seen has helpful to our mission.

I've not yet heard a persuasive idea about how we can integrate with, or
become more similar to, social media sites that overcomes these issues. But
I do intend to remain open minded.

- Trevor

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Daniel Friesen <daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com>
wrote:

> On 2015-01-09 11:59 AM, Strainu wrote:
> > 2015-01-09 21:24 GMT+02:00 Rob Moen <rmoen@wikimedia.org>:
> >> 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]
> > Actually, this seems like vandalism. See [5] for (what I believe to
> > be) the original content.
> >
> > Why would we have dozens of social media accounts if we thought they
> > are useless?
> >
> > Strainu
> >
> > [5]
> https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&oldid=999236
> DroneOfTheWiki made 2 vandalism edits, NicoV undid one
> <
> https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&oldid=1041046
> >
> but missed the other
> <
> https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Social_media&diff=prev&oldid=1039082
> >.
>
> I undid the remaining vandalism edit.
>
> ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
I'd say: hit social media! Make MediaWiki and Wikimedia look like a
*happening place*.

Everyone [*] who runs PHP is looking seriously at HHVM right now, and
that's entirely because WMF moved to it.

The Phabricator migration made it to lwn.net, which is low-traffic but
high-quality.

Basically, cool stuff happens around here and it needs to be blogged
and tweeted and facebooked and HNed and Reddited assiduously. This
will lure more brilliant people in to work on the cool stuff that
makes the world a better place.


- d.

[*] ymmv

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On 15-01-09 03:19 PM, Trevor Parscal wrote:
> 3. social media behaviors are not often seen has helpful to our mission.

That's a near-universal attitude amongst "old hands"; and has spawned a
number of "We are not Facebook" meme and a great deal of knee-jerk
reaction to any feature that can even vaguely be associated with social
media...

But I wonder how true that actually is. Did the Thanks feature get
generally positive results, for instance?

I hear a lot of "we don't want social media features" thrown around but
nary an explanation of /why/ that would be beyond handwaving about how
bad they are in respect to our mission.

-- Marc


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
There is indeed a mighty debate about this. When we discussed the simple
idea of a WikiShare extension to post articles on social media sites - it
raised a hell storm that I still have war flashbacks from.

Personally, I think the arguments against at least the ability to easily
share articles on social media are dwindling in logic and effect as more
time passes. It seems unlikely to me that enWP will adopt it first - but I
think it's possible that other project wikis may. There are some that
already essentially do this using templates. I continue to believe that an
extension solution remains preferable - and will once again offer to work
on that if there is indeed a desire. The last few times the end results on
if it was worth the time were mixed.

-greg aka varnent

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:21 PM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd say: hit social media! Make MediaWiki and Wikimedia look like a
> *happening place*.
>
> Everyone [*] who runs PHP is looking seriously at HHVM right now, and
> that's entirely because WMF moved to it.
>
> The Phabricator migration made it to lwn.net, which is low-traffic but
> high-quality.
>
> Basically, cool stuff happens around here and it needs to be blogged
> and tweeted and facebooked and HNed and Reddited assiduously. This
> will lure more brilliant people in to work on the cool stuff that
> makes the world a better place.
>
>
> - d.
>
> [*] ymmv
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
I would like to see more social media features in mediawiki. You can
flame me off-list, I'm just registering an opinion.

I think we also need to maintain our core competency -- WMF should not
be building a twitter or facebook or google plus clone, clearly. But
social features built around the needs of editors to collaboratively
build a wiki are apropos.

IMNSHO.
--scott

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Gregory Varnum <gregory.varnum@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is indeed a mighty debate about this. When we discussed the simple
> idea of a WikiShare extension to post articles on social media sites - it
> raised a hell storm that I still have war flashbacks from.

I'm interested in this.

Unlike most sites, we don't provide share buttons that encourage
people to share our content. Sure people can still share it, but
people can sometimes be lazy. A reddit this, tweet this button, share
button might make all the difference.

Are we missing opportunities by not encouraging people to interact
with these large social networks e.g. helping them shout about new
pages they have created, pages that they wish were better? I mean when
I look back to article feedback I wonder why that wasn't implemented
as a share button as it would have tapped into an already established
market and hopefully brought attention to articles in need of
improvement.

What if #editwikipedia became a trending topic on Twitter due to us
adding a tweet this page feature to edit mode. Wouldn't this be a good
thing? Even at the cost of a share button that could be seen as
supporting a non-open site. Why are we not exploring this kind of
thing?

In addition to this we don't play well with these sites. For example
if you post a link to Wikipedia on any social media website the image
that gets shared tends to be the mediawiki.org site (FYI [1]). It
probably makes the article on social networks look less appealing and
possibly less attention gets drawn to it. Why are we not celebrating
the work of our editors more?

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66930

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Jan 9, 2015 3:24 PM, "Rob Moen" <rmoen@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
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:

> 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).
>

You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post
that Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion
copies of her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has
the TRUTH!" accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's
article. The last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.

KWW


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to abuse
it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning that
new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't
different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to your
example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about our
favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that bad?
Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now,
there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:

> Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
>
> 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).
>>
>>
> You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post that
> Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies of
> her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!"
> accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The
> last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
>
> KWW
>
>
>
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>



--
Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
If you're interested, the Wikipedia app has functionality which lets you
share interesting snippets of articles to the social medium of your choice.
We have special "Tweet a Fact" functionality in alpha on Android; when you
highlight text in the app, and you tap the little chat bubble in the menu,
it creates a bitmap and posts it to the social medium of your choice.

Here's an example of what it's like if you do it on the Bern article:
https://twitter.com/danjgarry/status/553689032455360512

The Android and iOS SDKs include a lot of functionality for this kind of
social sharing since it's an established user workflow for mobile apps.
It's relatively easy for us to build this out.

You can test the Android alpha by going to http://android-builds.wmflabs.org on
your Android device and downloading the APK.

Dan

On 9 January 2015 at 11:24, Rob Moen <rmoen@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
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l




--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:01:
> As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to abuse
> it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning that
> new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't
> different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to your
> example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about our
> favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that bad?
> Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now,
> there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.

Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I
will shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot.
Your counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got
experience with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of
inexperienced editors and we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep
them from damaging it.

KWW


>
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
> kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
>
>> Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
>>
>> 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).
>>>
>>>
>> You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post that
>> Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies of
>> her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the TRUTH!"
>> accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The
>> last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
>>
>> KWW
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>
>
>


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
I'd be really interested knowing how our inbound referral traffic from
social sites differs from that from inbound traffic to social and news
sites from social referral traffic. When we talk about reader decline, we
rarely talk about how much a small increase in social referrals could
offset that.



*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation

M +1 415 609 4043 \\ @jaredzimmerman <http://loo.ms/g0>


On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:

> Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:01:
>
>> As always, if there is a way to do something, there will be a way to abuse
>> it. Remember when we enabled IPv6 support some people started moaning that
>> new style IPs are vandalising even though the rate of vandalism wasn't
>> different between IPv4 and IPv6 anons? This is the same situation: to your
>> example one can always provide a counterexample, "OMG the article about
>> our
>> favorite singer is so crappy, let's all help make it awesome!" Is that
>> bad?
>> Even someone as hating social networks as me has to agree that by now,
>> there's no rational reason not to add social sharing buttons.
>>
>
> Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will
> shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your
> counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience
> with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and
> we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
>
> KWW
>
>
>
>
>> On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
>> kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
>>
>> Brian Wolff schreef op 2015/01/09 om 15:17:
>>>
>>> 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).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> You missed the worst part: "Some evil administrator won't let me post
>>> that
>>> Mariah Carey/Iggy Azalea/pop singer of the week sold 50 bajillion copies
>>> of
>>> her latest album! Fans Unite, and make sure that Wikipedia has the
>>> TRUTH!"
>>> accompanied by an "edit this article" link to the singer's article. The
>>> last thing we need to do is make that kind of crap easier.
>>>
>>> KWW
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]

> 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
>


Exactly. This is the primary divisive aspect.
* Do we include links to Everyone Who Asks? (There are dozens of options at
http://www.sharethis.com/get-sharing-tools/ and ending up with
http://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png at the top of every page is the fear of many
editors. We've seen those sites that end every blog post with a massive
line of share-icons... It's aesthetically ugly, because the icons are all a
mishmash of styles.) So, What Criteria would we use, to select the services
that are given this significant endorsement?
* Do we display All Links At Once (if there are a lot)? or just a few by
default and the rest in an expanding section?
* Do we select the same services globally, or let each language pick their
own preferences? (e.g. Sina Weibo, QQ, Viber, etc). These issues are ripe
for argument, which is one reason we avoid it altogether.

The* icons *are the second most divisive aspect.
The proponents generally want to use or include the services' icons,
because those are the most recognizable (and briefest, which is good!) way
to link to them.
But those icons are not CC-BY-SA (I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I
recall it being mentioned).
And they're VERY eyecatching/distracting, in our generally plain-text
reading UI, which is the strongest objection.


I personally think that adding text-links (no icons) would be a reasonable
step forward. That is what the Indonesian Wikipedia has done. I think a few
other wikimedia wikis also include share links, in either the sidebar or
the header?


All the existing extensions and scripts, and the few wikimedia wikis that
already have some sort of "share" button, are (or should be) included at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media_plugins
That is probably the best place to summarize the pros/cons, and to list the
past discussions, and the technical options.


[...]


> 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.
>
>
+1
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
>
> Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will
> shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your
> counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience
> with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and
> we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.


Since when an inflow of new editors is a bad thing? Of course, not all
newbies will become productive editors, but if we start outright potential
new people, we will end up with Wikipedia ran by three grumpy cats. See
Citizendium for an example of a wiki that failed because it couldn't
maintain a stream of new contributors as old ones were leaving.
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:27 PM, quiddity <pandiculation@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
>
>> 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
>>
>
>
> Exactly. This is the primary divisive aspect.
> * Do we include links to Everyone Who Asks?

What if we used Wikidata and had an open form of sharing?
I could imagine us asking Wikidata what things are instance of sharing
platforms and what the URL for them. Using something like OOJS UI's
InputLookupWidget you could allow users to search for their preferred
service in this category.

We could then keep track for a given user their preferred services.

This means we would be completely neutral. It could also be a bit of a
game changer in the open web. Maybe we could revive
http://webintents.org/ using Wikidata?

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Max Semenik schreef op 2015/01/09 om 16:41:
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
> kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com> wrote:
>>
>> Not sure where to reply to a top-post to a bottom posted thread, so I will
>> shoot for the middle and hope people can keep track of this knot. Your
>> counterexample (which can be manually done today, so I've got experience
>> with it) invariably winds up with a fan-flood of inexperienced editors and
>> we wind up semi-protecting the article to keep them from damaging it.
>
>
> Since when an inflow of new editors is a bad thing? Of course, not all
> newbies will become productive editors, but if we start outright potential
> new people, we will end up with Wikipedia ran by three grumpy cats. See
> Citizendium for an example of a wiki that failed because it couldn't
> maintain a stream of new contributors as old ones were leaving.

Who said an inflow was a bad thing? It's not. A surge all focused on one
particular topic is a bad thing, a random distribution focused on a
random group of topics is a good thing.

KWW


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On 9 January 2015 at 15:26, Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> I'd be really interested knowing how our inbound referral traffic from
> social sites differs from that from inbound traffic to social and news
> sites from social referral traffic. When we talk about reader decline, we
> rarely talk about how much a small increase in social referrals could
> offset that.


Tweet a Fact functionality may be able to answer some of these questions;
there is a ?source=app appended to the URL so we can see what kind of
traffic these shares are driving.

Dan

--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
> On 10 jan. 2015, at 02:10, Jon Robson <jdlrobson@gmail.com> wrote:

> What if we used Wikidata and had an open form of sharing?
> I could imagine us asking Wikidata what things are instance of sharing
> platforms and what the URL for them. Using something like OOJS UI's
> InputLookupWidget you could allow users to search for their preferred
> service in this category.
>
> We could then keep track for a given user their preferred services.
>
> This means we would be completely neutral. It could also be a bit of a
> game changer in the open web. Maybe we could revive
> http://webintents.org/ using Wikidata?

I’ve dabbled quite a bit in this topic, and with the exception of using wikidata as the data platform to query from (which wasn’t around a few years ago), this is exactly how I always envisioned this could and should work for wikipedia.

But we simply never had time to build a neutral sharing platform that was usable for Wikipedia. Perhaps now with so much more infrastructure in place, it would be doable.

DJ
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Rob, thank you for this post and the discussion it has started, and thank
you also for detecting (indirectly) a relative subtle piece of vandalism in
our mw:Social_media page.

There are many mixed topics here, and solving each requires many more mixed
tasks. I have picked the one that our Engineering Community team is
directly responsible for, and I have created an epic task for it:

mediawiki.org news distributed to social media and Wikimedia tech blog
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86437

I went into some details and probably made some assumptions; everything is
editable. :)


On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Rob Moen <rmoen@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
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--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
I smell another Jon/thedj/aude collaboration coming up... :)
On 10 Jan 2015 02:27, "Derk-Jan Hartman" <d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> > On 10 jan. 2015, at 02:10, Jon Robson <jdlrobson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What if we used Wikidata and had an open form of sharing?
> > I could imagine us asking Wikidata what things are instance of sharing
> > platforms and what the URL for them. Using something like OOJS UI's
> > InputLookupWidget you could allow users to search for their preferred
> > service in this category.
> >
> > We could then keep track for a given user their preferred services.
> >
> > This means we would be completely neutral. It could also be a bit of a
> > game changer in the open web. Maybe we could revive
> > http://webintents.org/ using Wikidata?
>
> I’ve dabbled quite a bit in this topic, and with the exception of using
> wikidata as the data platform to query from (which wasn’t around a few
> years ago), this is exactly how I always envisioned this could and should
> work for wikipedia.
>
> But we simply never had time to build a neutral sharing platform that was
> usable for Wikipedia. Perhaps now with so much more infrastructure in
> place, it would be doable.
>
> DJ
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