Proposal:Wikimedia social networking platform

Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

Add full social networking features to Wikimedia sites.

Proposal

  • Change "User Profile" page in such way that it may be used as a page for social networking.
  • Allow to contributors to choose how their logged in Main Page would look like (for example, instead of regular Main Page, logged in contributors may be able to see pages of their interest).
  • Add other social networking features, like causal games.
  • Add private messages, groups and other personal features.
  • Make connections to other social networking sites, like Facebook, Orkut and even Wikia are.
  • Make relevant policies.
  • Even it is not "in the spirit of wiki", it would be another layer of Wikimedia features. We already have blog aggregator[1].
  • However, keep in mind that Wikimedia projects are spreading education; which means that not all entertaining content may be acceptable for Wikimedia social networking platform.

Motivation

  • Wikimedia's primary goal is spreading education. Social networking is a complementing feature to education.
  • MediaWiki already has some social networking features and Wikia is using them.
  • While Wikimedia projects are popular, many contributors are not strongly enough connected to them, because there is no place for social networking. Such feature would increase number of contributors[2], as well as Wikimedia would be able to design social relations in more positive way than present social networking sites do now.
  • If implemented, Wikimedia projects would be the first large scale community-driven social networking place on the Internet. It would help coworking and team building between contributors within the wikimedia community.

Potential Costs

  • A development team for this project should be found. Approximation is ~250.000 USD/year.

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Thank you to discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Wikimedia social networking platform.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. --Copyleft 16:17, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Conclusion

User or IP contributions are publicly tracked outsite the wikimedia community[3]. We need new social tools to empower active users inside the Wikimedia network !

References

  1. Planet Wikimedia is a combined view on what Wikimedia project participants have to say in their blogs about wikis.
  2. and valuable contributions of other community experts
  3. Use Wikichecker for example

External links