Favorites/Bodnotbod
After a couple months reading and contributing to this wiki I think I'm firm in the two areas where I:
- Think progress is attainable
- Will have a great impact
- and can be applied to all projects.
1. Rewarding editors (see Category:Proposals for editor awards or rewards and the article editor awards and rewards).
We need to greatly improve on the barnstar. Ideally the best of our editors should be able to use their service to Wikipedia as a bonus for their CV. This will require that the rewards are given following a relatively stringent procedure of assessment. The very best editors should get a letter/certificate from the Foundation in appreciation for their work.
There's plenty to be offered below that, though; I greatly like the idea of 'video game' style features that provide short-term rewards for achievable goals.
2. Embracing some aspects of social sites (see Category:Proposals for new social features and the article social features).
We need to make project user pages worth returning to. At the moment we visit our own user page mainly to add more detail about ourselves. But I think they could act as a personal hub where we can track what our friends have been doing on the projects. For example, what if I could see on my userpage what ten of my friends with accounts across all Wikimedia projects had done in the last day or so? Maybe they wouldn't even have to edit? There could be a "reddit" type button on an article which would feed into the system that a user has read a particular article and then that would appear on his friends user page as a recent activity. Users should have a way of following the activities of friends. It will keep people coming back to check for updates.
We also need better communication tools for editors. I think, though, that they should also be completely transparent so that all interaction is logged and publicly viewable as all edits are now. I want to be able to communicate with ten people who share an interest by clicking just one "submit" button. I should be able to message everyone who edited a particular article (or everyone that has signed up to receive messages sent "to the article").
I think any increase in communication may create attendant problems, so such ideas would have to be given serious scrutiny to make sure they don't cause unforseen difficulties.
Top priority
These proposals all address the issue I'm most interested in: how do we recruit, keep and motivate editors whilst getting the best out of them? I think it's all about rewards (my proposal).
- Proposal:Add game-like features - like my proposal but appealing to a different segment of the population.
- Proposal:Include competitive approaches to creating content - a similar one to above.
- Proposal:Run an annual prize for best featured content - yet another proposal that would give a tangible something to valued editors.
- Proposal:Involving older people - perhaps older people would be more inspired to join if the rewards were there.
- Proposal:Can Wikimedia Become A 300 Million People Movement By 2020? - makes direct mention of FaceBook and wonders what we can learn from it.
- Proposal:Community_sustainability - an element of which specifically mentions editor rewards.
Others I like
Most favoured
These are proposals that I think are great and very important but also ones I may not involve myself with much as the strategy process goes on.
- Proposal:Create an accessibility committee - maintain good accessibility for disabled people.
- Proposal:Reach out by active promotion of content in wiki-weak large languages - seed content in smaller Wikipedias by identifying most needed articles and perhaps paying for translations for them to help small Wikis grow.
Keen on
These are proposals which I think may help the projects but don't have such strong feelings about.
- Proposal:Create_a_reputation_system_and_require_logging-in_to_edit - no more anon edits, more editor accountability. Probably getting rid of anon edits will not be considered but I like the reputation system idea.
- Proposal:Move_references_out_of_the_code - which would help inexperienced editors.
- Proposal:Defining and enhancing analytics from Wikipedia data - develop community interest in developing, extracting and interpreting data about the projects.
- Proposal:Search engine optimization - keep Wikipedia near the top of search.
- Proposal:Getting in touch with people who have no Internet access more
Consider
These are proposals I like the sound of but am not particularly passionate about.
- Proposal:Improve_transparency_of_article_status_and_the_editing_process - put article issues in info boxes on page, listing problems, be able to add to such a list easily.
- Proposal:Implement OAuth for MediaWiki (and employ in Wikimedia) - diversify methods of editing, with a view to targeting wikiprojects.
- Proposal:Volunteer Toolkit - provide more support for volunteers in a number of ways.
- Proposal:Wikinews Accredited Reporter Identity Cards - ID for wikijournalists.
- Proposal:Wiki for kids - this is basically addressed by "simple" wiki, but perhaps it could be proposed that Simple.Wiki get more support.
- Proposal:Foundations for Interactive Articles - improve hosting of multimedia/interactive content.
Needs lots of work, but could develop into something
These are proposals that I think have the seed of a good idea but the proposal is lacking as put forwards by the contributor.
- Proposal:Wikipedia Fundraising Strategy (small donations) - "In summary, keep all the data, edits, articles, and links you can. Let the trash naturally sink to the bottom of the article pages and searches, and hit up folks for a donation."
- Proposal:Visualize revision history in a fancy way - has interesting ideas of viewing revision histories in a more helpful way. I agree that navigating histories is time consuming and dull, so would like improvement.
- Proposal:Wikimedia for Education - skew things towards schools.
Good feature requests, but probably not strategies (roughly in order of how much I like them)
- Proposal:Rename the discussion page - perhaps to include "questions?" and/or "feedback". Very easy to achieve. Low hanging fruit. Perhaps broaden to a strategy by thinking about how we interact with those who are primarily readers.
- Proposal:Get another CMS for Commons - proposal to allow better organisation of media, including tagging. Reasonably easy to accomplish given funding?
- Proposal:Universal User Page - one user page across projects. More of a feature request than a strategy.
- Proposal:AJAX based quick editing - would allow quick inline editing of missing punctuation, typos. But perhaps not technically feasible, or - if possible - perhaps dangerous.
- See also Proposal:Editing usability improvements - WYSIWYG + inline editing as in previous proposal.
- Proposal:Between blue links and red links: orange links - orange links to indicate stubs or poor articles, green links to featured content. Should probably be a preference rather than a default in my view. More of a feature than a strat.
- Proposal:Graveyard - an enhanced way to track text that has been removed from articles. More of a feature request than a strategy?
Favoured resources
- Interview with Piskorski (PDF) - very relevant to 'strengthening the community' issues.
- Interview with Riggs (PDF) - ditto.
- Interview with Schulenberg (PDF) - has some nice ideas about strengthening the community, adding social networking features.
- Participation/Attracting new participants and retaining existing participants - research from the fact base relevant to my favoured task force.
- Wikimedia Report Card - lots of stats showing figures for Aug 08 to Aug 09.
Favoured task forces
- One I intend to work on:
- To be closely involved with:
Unsorted proposals for task force
- Proposal:Embedded_live_user_assistance - an embedded chat window for newbies.
- Proposal:Events_(Ongoing_support_of_community-run_events), Proposal:Establish_community_of_wiki_members_in_specific_areas_or_locals - offline support for Wikimedians meeting up.
- Proposal:Extend_editors'_identity_creation - somewhat social media-like.
- Proposal:Help_people_understand_the_variety_of_ways_in_which_the_may_contribute - people don't contribute because they don't appreciate all the ways they could help.
- Proposal:User_pages_should_work_more_like_social_networking_sites - would improving tools for community interaction enhance community health? I think it might make people stick around and use the site more. There's a number of "social networking" proposals. None of them strike me as superb. But I think some way of connecting users and being able to communicate with a group of users in one edit would be useful; for example "send message to all users that have edited this article".