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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Our referral traffic for 10/13 - 10/14 months follows. It's heavily
weighted towards seach. There are some industry wide issues about
identifying referrals from Facebook and Twitter's mobile apps which
probably underestimate the numbers but it seems like we have some room to
improve here.

According to this report from Buzzfeed[1], social and search referrals (the
way the industry thinks about referrals) are about even (around a third of
traffic each) in 2014. When I was at Yahoo a few years ago, social was just
starting to approach search so this seems reasonable.

-Toby

Wikipedia Referral Traffic (10/13 - 10/14)[2]

Other

84,951,586,000.00

Google

78,603,395,000.00

Internal

73,696,896,000.00

Yahoo

4,756,204,000.00

Yandex

1,951,328,000.00

Bing

1,939,456,000.00

Baidu

569,554,000.00

Reddit

328,492,000.00

Naver

319,629,000.00

Ask

271,658,000.00

Facebook

260,840,000.00

Twitter

190,642,000.00

Sogou

101,626,000.00

Seznam

97,720,000.00

DuckDuckGo

80,658,000.00

Daum

69,569,000.00

AOL

67,526,000.00

Startpage

56,814,000.00

[1] http://insights.buzzfeed.com/industry-trends-2014/
[2] data assembled for readership report, 12/14 from
http://pentaho.wmflabs.org/pentaho/Home

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:26 PM, 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.
>
>
>
> *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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> 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 10/01/15 09:17, Brian Wolff wrote:
> 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).

Hmmm, IIRC I did actually propose NSFW filters on Commons at one
point. I'll happily propose this one too.

> 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

Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of
hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like
Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.

> *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)

By the same argument, we should probably ban all external links.

> *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.

Surely this is an untenable argument now that the websites of so many
scientific journals have share links? e.g.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/65/6/1721.abstract

-- Tim Starling


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Tim Starling wrote:
>Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of
>hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like
>Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.

You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want
<https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png> or equivalent on our sites. Such a mess
of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.

Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my
opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page on
Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying
to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit
noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a colorful
icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we
probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.

MZMcBride



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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tim Starling" <tstarling@wikimedia.org>

> > *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.
>
> Surely this is an untenable argument now that the websites of so many
> scientific journals have share links? e.g.
>
> http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/65/6/1721.abstract

I personally attribute that to "we're so small, we have to cave on this point
or no one will know we're here", a problem a small journal might have, but
which Wikipedia certainly does not.

I'm on the "don't bother" side, for nearly all the reasons previously
enumerated.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274

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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 9:35 PM, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my
> opinion.



I'm in the "eh" camp, but I also don't think it's that much pain if done
properly. This article sums it up pretty well:
http://exisweb.net/truth-about-share-buttons

There's a lot of interesting stuff to parse on that page (much of which
I've admittedly skimmed, because "eh"). The conclusion: "If a page is
shared, it’s not due to share buttons, but because it is useful and
interesting. However, if well thought out and integrated with the site,
social buttons can be beneficial in a small way."

Rob
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Hoi,
The great thing of personal opinion is that they make great arguments, they
have their point When they are presented well they are compelling..
HOWEVER, we are in the habit of testing many of these arguments.

This is a test that is bound to be interesting to many of us.
Thanks,
GerardM

On 12 January 2015 at 06:35, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Tim Starling wrote:
> >Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of
> >hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like
> >Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
>
> You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want
> <https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png> or equivalent on our sites. Such a mess
> of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
>
> Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my
> opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page on
> Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying
> to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit
> noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a colorful
> icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we
> probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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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 ]
Your help pushing these tasks to some direction is welcome:

"Share" button (tools) in Wikipedia
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T29027

enhancement - add social sharing feature after upload
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T42456


On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> The great thing of personal opinion is that they make great arguments, they
> have their point When they are presented well they are compelling..
> HOWEVER, we are in the habit of testing many of these arguments.
>
> This is a test that is bound to be interesting to many of us.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On 12 January 2015 at 06:35, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
> > Tim Starling wrote:
> > >Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of
> > >hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like
> > >Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
> >
> > You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want
> > <https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png> or equivalent on our sites. Such a
> mess
> > of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
> >
> > Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my
> > opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page
> on
> > Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying
> > to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to
> submit
> > noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a
> colorful
> > icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we
> > probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
> >
> > MZMcBride
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>



--
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 ]
Assuming that we even use icons! I think a text drop down box which lists
the various networks that one could share onto would work just as well.

On 12 January 2015 at 15:35, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Tim Starling wrote:
> >Yes, there's a risk we could end up with an alphabetical list of
> >hundreds of social networks to share an article on, like
> >Special:Booksources. Better than nothing, I guess.
>
> You guess wrong. As quiddity points out, we don't want
> <https://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png> or equivalent on our sites. Such a mess
> of icons is ugly and tacky and awful. It would be worse than nothing.
>
> Adding social media icons is a lot of pain for very little gain, in my
> opinion. People who want to tweet about an article or post about a page on
> Facebook can (and do!) copy and paste the URL. What problem are we trying
> to solve here? If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit
> noise into the ether and our users are only capable of clicking a colorful
> icon and using a pre-filled tweet or Facebook post or e-mail body, we
> probably need to re-evaluate what we're trying to accomplish and why.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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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 ]
On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
> What problem are we trying to solve here?

The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the
number of people who read our content, thus educating more people,
thus better meeting our mission.

> If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit
> noise into the ether

If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that
gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong
project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it easier.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On 12/01/15 17:11, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> I personally attribute that to "we're so small, we have to cave on this point
> or no one will know we're here", a problem a small journal might have, but
> which Wikipedia certainly does not.

Do you suppose Physical Review (the lumbering giant of physics
publishing) has that problem?

<http://journals.aps.org/prb/accepted/99078Yc6K231ec4c06a66cd9e85c6575ddf278adc>

Or PLOS ONE?

<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0107794>

Or Philosophical Transactions A?

<http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2035/20140347>

All have share links.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Tim Starling wrote:
>On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
>> What problem are we trying to solve here?
>
>The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the
>number of people who read our content, thus educating more people,
>thus better meeting our mission.

You seem to be drawing a very large correlation between social media
sharing and reading (or educating). I think that's a dubious correlation.

The question was what problem are we trying to solve. An appeal to the
Wikimedia Foundation vision statement is clever, particularly as it uses
the word share, but Wikipedia currently has more visitors than nearly
every site on the Internet (cf. <http://www.alexa.com/topsites>). Given
this, I don't buy the argument that's there a need for social media
sharing links, which we've done without for over a decade. Would some
people use and enjoy share icons in the user interface? Yes, of course.
Does that make the investment cost worthwhile? Probably not.

>>If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit
>> noise into the ether
>
>If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that
>gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong
>project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it easier.

I think most of Twitter is noise. I think most of Facebook is noise. And
I'm not sure either site would disagree. Many of these social media sites
have operating principles (aggressive user data extraction and
aggregation, sponsored content, etc.) that are in opposition to
Wikimedia's values. So, sure, Wikipedia links would probably be welcome
signal in the seas of noise. That's a clear win for the social media sites
by giving them something of substance: educational content instead of
another paid post, sponsored tweet, or bot spam. The benefit to Wikipedia
still seems tenuous.

Encouraging legitimate content sharing seems like a worthwhile goal, but
it's unclear what that might actually look like. We've discussed features
such as "e-mail this article," but every modern Web browser has this
feature built in and available on any site. Wikimedia could provide a URL
shortener, but those aren't even necessary any longer as Twitter and other
services can just take care of long URLs using their own systems. You said
you were making a proposal earlier in this thread. I'm curious what that
proposal is. A "share" link in the sidebar would probably be more used
that the current (disturbingly prominent) "Print/export" sidebar section,
but I've somewhat lost track of what we're specifically discussing. We're
certainly not going to put Facebook "Like" buttons on every article or do
anything similarly harmful to our users. What, exactly, is being proposed?

MZMcBride



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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Tim, I have to disagree on that.

Imagine a world in which every single human being /can/ freely share
in the sum of all knowledge.

Most social media users can already read Wikipedia (and, I suppose, many
Wikipedia readers cannot use social media because of censorship).
And they almost surely know Wikipedia. "Inviting" them to visit the site
does not bring us closer to our mission.
Instead, why doesn't the Foundation focus on bringing the ability to
access our projects in places where they would be useful but cannot
really be used? (Africa?)

Il 12/01/2015 10:22, Tim Starling ha scritto:
> On 12/01/15 16:35, MZMcBride wrote:
>> What problem are we trying to solve here?
>
> The idea is to increase the number of shares, thus increasing the
> number of people who read our content, thus educating more people,
> thus better meeting our mission.
>
>> If the answer is that we want to make it painless to submit
>> noise into the ether
>
> If you think Wikipedia is "noise", compared to the usual stuff that
> gets shared on Facebook, maybe you're contributing to the wrong
> project. The idea is to make sharing more frequent, not to make it
> easier.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 2:45 PM, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:

>
> The question was what problem are we trying to solve. An appeal to the
> Wikimedia Foundation vision statement is clever, particularly as it uses
> the word share, but Wikipedia currently has more visitors than nearly
> every site on the Internet


Note that this is more true for the top five Wikipedias than for the
hundreds of other Wikimedia projects.


> I think most of Twitter is noise. I think most of Facebook is noise.


Wikimedia is signal. Social media services are used by millions covering
the kind of online diversity we are aiming for. Do we want to recruit new
editors in that diversity or not? If we do, there we can find millions of
users with the time, the equipment, and the basic education needed to do so.
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Re: Stance on Social Media [ In reply to ]
Here's perhaps a new way to think about social media. Let's focus on
one particular aspect of "not noise": news.

Twitter is a powerful tool for collecting/spreading real time news.
It also has many disadvantages, as we all know.

We have wikinews and other real-time information sources in our
project (including real-time edits to pages during big events, such as
the Olympics or Dancing With The Stars).

Why can't we work on integrating these better, so that when you are an
eyewitness with first-hand knowledge contributing to WikiNews is at
least as powerful/useful as tweeting? Perhaps integrating twitter and
flow (or something even more radical) to make this work really well.

If people either get in the habit of using wikinews instead of twitter
and/or wikinews becomes a powerful place to collect and filter tweets
on a topic (think of https://storify.com/ for inspiration), we can
further our educational goals, provide a "trusted" source for news
that can be edited/vetted/archived and eliminate the echo chamber of
misinformation which plagues twitter and facebook. We also help
produce new editors who are generating content for our sites in the
process of documenting and vetting first-hand sources during important
events.

In my view, this is a more radical radical to think about social
media. Not blindly trying to increase a "number of shares" metric,
but trying to make our project an integral part of how the fact-based
social experience works.

Ideally, this integration with real-time content would be
bidirectional: real-time sources can be seamlessly incorporated into
wikipedia articles where appropriate, and in the other direction
quoting and sharing relevant wikipedia articles (or wikisource or
wikiversity content, etc) in conversations in your extended social
network would be facilitated for answering questions/filling in
context/settling bar bets. This starts to look more like a
wikipedia-enabled twitter client (or a twitter-enabled wikipedia) than
a set of share icons.
--scott

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