Talk:Promote MediaWiki

Examples of New Proposal
This discussion is on specific examples found and discovered that are used to spread a service.


 * Thank you for the examples and your thoughts. Note that we already have How to contribute. Therefore, Promote MediaWiki should focus exclusively in ways to... Promote MediaWiki. :) --Qgil (talk) 18:31, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

IRCCloud
www.irccloud.com IRCCloud is in beta right now, so drawing a connection from MediaWiki to it is not the best, but it does effectively promote itself. IRCCloud has spread through "beta" invites, but these invites were not spread by the developers, but rather by existing users. Users when they sign up receive 3 beta invites, with a call to action "Invite a friend." It asks you to simply type their email address, and your friend is invited. Invites regenerate after a few days, so you can keep on inviting.

This is powerful as it promotes the website via word of mouth, which is oftentimes taken into much more consideration. Invites aren't spewed about, and getting into IRCCloud, which, for most, is only spread by word of mouth anyway, is a bit harder, so users find themselves asking friends for invites.

Obviously MediaWiki doesn't want to do something like this, but a prompt to invite current people to start participating in the community is a powerful thing. An appeal from a friend to start helping, perhaps even a request for them to improve an article or content, this can be powerful.

Druple Get-Involved
drupal.org/getting-involved Druple successfully promotes itself through three different community involvement topics. The first topic promotes an argument to support Druple by getting involved. It provides a link for people to get more information. The next topic spotlights the community, and is more to keep people involved than anything else. Finally, Druple provides a link of ways to directly interface with the community, and join in, links of relevance. MediaWiki should definitely implement this to keep people involved and to make it easy to get started. --Idofen (talk) 18:10, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Prezi Community
prezi.com/community Prezi's community is simple enough. It offers a dozen links to various media and community places where users can connect with Prezi's developers and help and support. To the right, a side bar includes common links that are to be used. Although the Prezi webpage doesn't create a way to spread Prezi, it still effectively allows potential members of the community to easily integrate into the community, and to access common resources.

Make Wordpress
make.wordpress.org Wordpress lays out, clean and simple, what areas a user can get involved with, and provides simple links for each section. It also provides IRCChannels for each one. This is a very simplistic and nice approach, includes good call to actions, and at the same time, also provides a way for the user to say "Hey! I could do that!"

Chromium Project
www.chromium.org/getting-involved The Chromium project's get involved page is sweet and simple. About half of the words on it are hyperlinks, and it lets people get started right away without any sort of fuss. Want to help test? Click here!

Conclusions
Use of personal reference and social connections is key. Links should be used to include references and commonly needed links, and ways to find and talk to people in the community. Frequently asked questions, and "How do I get started" resources would be good.

Mockup / Content
This page should be quite link heavy and should easily allow users to find out information on what they can do. It should also connect with social media, and people, to enable others to share and invite others to it. Separating the page into separate columns seems to be the most common approach, allowing more content and resources to be found over a quick scan. The page will probably be image heavy, and have lots of calls to actions. Right now, I think the following would be good sections.

Most effectively, simple tests, 1, 2, 3, tadah, are good, and can be used to either get people who aren't involved, involved, or to let people involved share it with the world.


 * Let's see how you implement this. "Link heavy" is risky: you might confuse potential promoters with many little instructions. Maybe it is better to highlight 1-3 tasks, and then leave the rest for more initiated promoters, perhaps at the end of the page, perhaps in a subpage, depending on your design choices and the amount of promoting tasks you have collected.--Qgil (talk) 18:35, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Connect
Connect with the community, ask questions, get support. Provide lots of links, to blogs, et cetera, and strong calls to actions to connect and join in, just drop right in. It should also get people over from being scared of doing stuff, whether it be editing, making their own wiki, et cetera. Links to potential ways to get a wiki started would be great.


 * As said above, don't confuse "getting involved" with "promote MediaWiki".--Qgil (talk) 18:35, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Start Contributing
This section should argue, and explain how to, contribute to MediaWiki, whether it be plugins, fixes, or other things. It should go over a few FAQ, and explain what MediaWiki can do for the person, and more importantly, how.


 * This is exactly the purpose of How to contribute. Promoting MediaWiki will be one of the sections in that page, leading to this page that you are creating here.--Qgil (talk) 18:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Resources
This should include resources for editors, writers, and developers, especially site managers.

Misc
There, probably at the top right corner of the page, be a way for people to share MediaWiki with friends, and more importantly, invite them to contribute. The page itself should follow MediaWiki's style, and perhaps include a spotlight of some sort. Tips and tricks would also be good. Idofen (talk) 18:13, 21 November 2013 (UTC)


 * It seems that this "Misc" is, in fact what this Promote MediaWiki page is all about.--Qgil (talk) 18:37, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Old Proposal [Archived]
The current proposal is to create a page that will excite and promote MediaWiki. More can be found here (PDF). There may be spelling and grammar mistakes and stuff, just a fair warning. Please feel free to discuss anything, et cetera, ask, any questions, et cetera. Idofen (talk &#124; contribs &#124; November 19) 03:56, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Wow, I'm impressed about the amount of work you have packed so quickly. Two comments, the first one being very important: this page must contain information about how contributors can promote MediaWiki. It is not meant to be a promotion of MediaWiki itself. Similar examples could include pages like the old Spread Firefox. Do you see the difference? Imagine that I'm a volunteer, I love MediaWiki and I want the entire World to know about it, use it, contribute to it... What can you show me in this page? PS: don't worry about the work you have done so far. Even if it turns out not to be related with the task requested, we will find a good use for it. It might even be reusable in a new task, but I can't promise anything just now. More tomorrow. Thank you very much for your energy and speed!--Qgil (talk) 04:43, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Fixed. Idofen (talk) 18:10, 21 November 2013 (UTC)