On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Thomas Morton <[email protected]> wrote:
> So the question that this leads me to is this: what can we do to improve > communication between these two groups. How can we vocalize the communities > thoughts, ideas and independence. How do we get the creativity and > versatility of the developers in front of the community. As far as communication goes, I think the way communication and publicity occurs on Wikipedia is a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes people are aware of the sheer size and diversity of Wikipedia, and the need for adequate communication and discussion of something with notices left in the right places. But even when something has been widely publicized and discussed, you will still get people turning up and saying "I wasn't aware of this" (which is why it is useful to have a summary of the notifications to point them towards, so they can realise where they should be paying attention). It doesn't really apply to developer-community interaction, but an attempt to cover the spectrum of publicity efforts is here (which I started a while ago): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Publicising_discussions Trouble is, I'm not sure how many people are aware of that advice. I do get the impression that a lot more of the centralised discussions get wide participation now, but it is always a balancing act between publicizing too much and too little (not everything needs lots and lots of notices). This is best summed up by what the page currently says: >From 'Wikipedia:Publicising discussions': "Most discussions will only use a few of the publicity methods shown. Normal discussions do not always need large amounts of input. A balance needs to be struck between gaining sufficient input for consensus, and overwhelming a discussion with too much input. Similarly, publicising minor discussions makes it more difficult for editors to identify the major discussions where their comments are more important." It would be really good to be able to follow the number of hits a page is getting in terms of *where* people came from to arrive at that page, and hence get an idea of which forms of notification work best, but I'm not sure that is technically possible or can be made public for various reasons (if it was, it could involve ranking the links in 'what links here' by how many hits they were generating). For developer-community interactions, the main problem is usually that developers do work off-wiki and may be working to different specifications to that that some editors on-wiki would prefer, and it is not always clear how much flexibility there is, and whether developers are following their preferences or whether it is software and/or time and available resources that is constraining them. But an important point for developers to pick up on is no matter how brilliant the work they do, it won't get used if the community it is written for don't like it, or react against it due to poor roll-out methods. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
