These are good thoughts, Pine! I'm glad you brought them up.
One of my favorite things about our social media in my five months at the
WMF has been reaching people who are enthusiastic about the movement and
eager to connect more.
“Wikipedia is why, even though I spent most of my adult life out of school
as a refugee, when I finally got to a safe place and into a university I
was able not only to compete with my peers, but to excel,” a Facebook user
named Ali who was born in Iraq and now lives in the United States posted on
our page.
We have more than 2 million Facebook followers in the "Global South," and
many are enthusiastic and curious to know more. We have at times asked
people on Facebook to tell us where in the world they are, and the
greetings we get back from around the world
<https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia/posts/10153738165583346> are fantastic.
At the same time, we also hear from editors such as Lilit from Armenia, who
posted: “Wikipedia has become our way of living, the idea which unites all
the editors around the world!”
If Ali and Lilit sound familiar, they were featured on our Wikipedia 15
website <https://15.wikipedia.org/> with these Facebook comments. Reaching
budding Wikipedians is a big part ofour social strategy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media>.
Our verified Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia?fref=ts>, Twitter
<https://twitter.com/Wikipedia> and Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/wikipedia/> accounts are places to showcase our
content and show that it is part of a movement of people.
We need more Wikipedians who enjoy social media and would like to help
guide our accounts. If that's you, I'd love to hear from you.
Jeff Elder
Digital communications manager
Wikimedia Foundation
704-650-4130
@jeffelder <https://twitter.com/JeffElder>
@wikipedia <https://twitter.com/wikipedia>
The Wikimedia blog <https://blog.wikimedia.org/>
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:18 PM, Ed Erhart wrote:
> Hi Pine,
>
> A big part of our efforts are to humanize the movement, surface our
> content, and reach new audiences—research shows that public awareness of
> Wikipedia and what it does is not as high as you'd think in emerging
> communities.
>
> The blog has been running in-depth and detailed articles like "News on
> Wikipedia: Antonin Scalia and the editor tracking his legacy,"[1] "These
> Texans are on a quest to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of their state’s
> revolution,"[2] and "Fifteen years ago, Wikipedia was a very different
> place: Magnus Manske"[3] to showcase our editors and contributors, along
> with their contributions to the movement. We plan to continue this in the
> coming months.
>
> Our posts that look at article popularity try to go deeper, examining the
> editing behind them. Antonin Scalia does that, as does "Millions read Bowie
> biography following sudden death."[4] We highlight featured articles
> wherever possible.
>
> We also surface fantastic content from our contributors, such as
> "Recording romanticism and filling Wikimedia Commons with 19th-century
> music"[5] or "Love is strange: ten weird Valentine’s facts from
> Wikipedia,"[6] although I freely admit that our social media platforms can
> do this far more often than the blog can.
>
> I'm cc'ing Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager, on this email so
> that he can talk about his fantastic work on social media. Some of the
> comments we get are astounding, and we've started the process of expanding
> to new platforms—including Instagram.[7]
>
> Best,
> --Ed
>
> [1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/17/scalia-wikipedia/
> [2]
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/30/improving-wikipedia-texas-revolution/
> [3]
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/18/fifteen-years-wikipedia-magnus-manske/
> [4] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/28/bowie-death-wikipedia/
> [5] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/14/spain-recording-romanticism/
> [6] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/12/love-is-strange/
> [7] https://www.instagram.com/wikipedia/
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:33 PM, Pine W wrote:
>
>> An interesting article in Fortune:
>> http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/buzzfeed-metrics/. "One of the biggest
>> challenges in online publishing, Nguyen says, is the continual process of
>> re-evaluating what criteria the company should be looking at in order to
>> gauge its effectiveness in reaching an audience, a process that BuzzFeed
>> calls “re-anchoring.” In effect, it’s an almost scientific approach of
>> checking to see whether the thing being measured is actually the thing
>> that
>> is most important."
>>
>> While WMF seems to be focused on p