Proposal:Build experts communities
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
Making possible for rexperts or people with specific aeras of interest to meet on thoose specific subjects, to share, and to develop dynamics that would enhance participation.
Proposal
It would be great to make possible to build expert communities around specific subjects. So that experts would have a pool to meet, share and discuss. Writting a part of an article would be a maneer to show his knowldege to the rest of the topic community. Also it would be a maneer to enhance his own knowledge by seeing what other people correct and tell him.
The idea is to work on social UX for groups on Wikipedia. not only ergonomics, but also what makes the people enter in contact and develop relationship. This could be a good motor for paticipation.
According to researchers communities need to be able to make a bunch of usages : conversation, serious dicussions, expriment, have a project to build, personal page, place to tell stories, place to give visions, place to store knowledge and project's process... Thoose usages are well known and good company softwares like Jive or BlueKiwi know how to make good tools that could be a good benchmark.
Also, all of this would have to be adapted to mediawiki by experts in management and UX design. Developpers can't be all genius (unless some are), so habving experts on them side could be a great help.
The idea is to develop super-simple tools that can support and guide the usages of people. making them clear that there is a place for them community dynamics.
Then to support the start of commnities. making clear that wikipedia is also a place for them.
Even if there is only 10% of thoose experts that really create pages, other would be there to create dynamics on the expert's community and make people comming. Also the content created inside the community can be a vauable sourc eof knowledge and experience that can't be find in the core Wikipedia articles and that are important day to day. I always have a look to the discussion page when I am interested in an article in case of I would find advices and elements on trends and vision.
Motivation
The main thing is : there is currently a bunch of community site sthat share knowledge and that could decide to come on wikipedia if we were able to support them dynamics. What best that being the wikipedia's community ?
Also social features are a key to enter in the Wikimedia community dynamics. Being able to dicuss, share and exchange with other members help to understand the spirit of the project and to develop contacts and relationship that make a retribution for the user. Also, it helps discovering the tool himself.
Poeple are organized around centers of interest. For example I made some contrubutions about UX design beacause I am a designer. I may have also made contributions about baseball if I was a fan a baseball.
Firms social softwares are organised around communities. Project comunities but also transversal communities : "communities of practices" of people having the same type of job.
Hre are a few examples of dynamics that could be used :
- Experts are always looking for networking. Also sharing them knowledge is a point that help being evaluated as an expert. How does an expert can be visible nowdays on wikipedia? All what he does is pure gift to the community, with not retribution. This is maybe a reason whuy I see so many professors in comparaison of the number of the number of professionals (with the "vocation" point maybe).
- In mamangement theorics, having a person as a guide and the employe want to please is one of the motors.
- When someone is lost on the project, don't understand, there is always a reflex of asking a person he feel confident in (could ba an admin for ex.).
- An other point is that people simplely love discussing and that if they stay for this reason, they may edit more the wikipages they have in front of them.
- ...
Key Questions
Will we be able to develop this ? (maybe in an agil way ?)
How much this will cost in server maintenance, with the explosion of the number of people ?
Potential Costs
This could mutiply the amount of content by adding also more discussions and exchanges. This means more cost o server maintenance.
Also it is not easy to find UX desigers for free. The most probable is to find designers that accept to work on an rapid expert methodology. Wich means they will have no proof of what they say. having a rapid expert is better than nothing and this methodology is the most innovative (this is the one Apple use) yet if peope are not confident in the UX team because they build on vision this could lead too some problematics to let them doing them work. If this happen having a pool similar to the usability initiative with also a user including brainstoming could be nice.
References
- Communities of practices : ISBN-10: 2212540124
- Wikinomics
Community Discussion
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