Consider, for example, that Zynga and Facebook have successfully
managed to
get millions of people to log in at all hours of the night to milk
virtualcows and harvest virtual beans (or whatever it is that people
actually do in Farmville). Could we do something similar to drive
particpation, particularly in editing areas that don't require
long-duration sessions (e.g. adding or verifying citations,
categorizing
articles, etc.)? Even a few percent of Farmville's user base would
be an
order-of-magnitude increase of our own editor base; and if the price
for
that is letting these editors display Citationville badges on their
user
pages and send each other silly messages, is it not worth it?
This is actually a very good example. Imagine this happened, and we got
for several hours a million of users who do not know anything about BLP,
verifiability, POV, notability, and other issues. Would we be able to
clean up their edits? I doubt it. If I remember well, when 80K landscape
pictures of British Isles were donated to Commons more than a year ago
(which is certainly a good thing), they were not categorized, and many
of them (several dozen of thousands) remained uncategorized last time I
checked. We will not just be able to digest this.
The way out obviously that we do not have a million random editors. We
want a million of editors who understand basic principles and know what
they want to do. I just do not see how it could happen. When I
personally ask my friends to upload photos which are clearly needed (for
instance, to illustrate an already existing article), my best success is
to ask them to send a mail to OTRS, and then I upload photos myself. And
uploading a photo is generally easier than to find a category for an
article or to source a statement.
Cheers
Yaroslav
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
