Submissions:2016/The Sad, Sad Story of Social Wikipedia


 * Title: The Sad, Sad Story of Social Wikipedia


 * Theme: community


 * Type of submission: presentation


 * Author: Kim Schoonover


 * E-mail address: zhorishna@undefinedgmail.com


 * Username: Isarra


 * Affiliation: Volunteer mw developer


 * Abstract:

Wikipedia has a long and strange history with social tools, with users trying to implement their own over the years, rejecting those and others, and generally not getting much of anything into MediaWiki core or deployed on the wiki itself, to the point where Wikipedia and MediaWiki in general have developed something of a reputation for being very stark and doing nothing to foster user interaction and community growth. But such tools have existed for years, developed by other projects such as wikiHow and ArmchairGM, and by many different volunteers on-wiki in personal js, and now, despite all the push-back against anything too facebook-like in the past, we see valuable tools such as Echo deployed and widely-adopted and appreciated by users.

This talk will cover some of the history of social tools on the English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and how various attempts have failed, been adopted, never even shown up in production in the first place, and what the future may yet hold for a more productive social MediaWiki experience on the projects.


 * Length of presentation: 15-30 min. unless I can get more people to speak


 * Special schedule requests: n/a


 * Preferred room size: No idea


 * Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?: Maybe; my attendance will little to do with whether or not my submissions are accepted and everything to do with budget.

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