Social media/en


 * If you're looking to add social features to your MediaWiki installation, please see for more info.

Follow and share MediaWiki news across your social networks!

Please keep using the usual project channels for support, bug reports and discussion (why?).

Main accounts
These are the official accounts spreading news about the MediaWiki community at large.


 * @MediaWiki at Twitter
 * MediaWiki at Facebook

Also check the workflow for posting updates, sharing posts and following accounts.

Our approach
Social media websites are useful for spreading news and reaching out to potential users and contributors. Social media can also be very demanding and time-consuming. Careless use can fragment communities, draining away free content and public contacts to social media platform owners' frequently closed and commercially-driven environments.

The Community Relations team at the Wikimedia Foundation are happy to use social media when it is useful and simple to manage, but we are reluctant to put a lot of effort engaging, promoting and building isolated sub-communities. We try to use social media to direct interested individuals back to existing community gathering places (Wikimedia events, discussion pages, and of course wikis themselves). Help and ideas for improvement are welcome.

Workflow
This is how we handle the @MediaWiki accounts on various social media sites.
 * 1) We post to each account separately. Automation / aggregation isn't worthwhile, currently.
 * 2) Look at explicit mentions and replies.
 * 3) Share if appropriate, using the functionality of the service,  e.g. don't type "RT" in Twitter.
 * 4) No replies are posted by @MediaWiki accounts. Just pointing to the right feedback channels is okay. We don't want to engage in parallel discussion / support. You can do this from your personal account if you so choose.
 * 5) We pick from multiple sources. Here's a few places we look for things to share.
 * 6) Look at the timeline. Share if there is anything technically relevant.
 * 7) Pull from existing sources
 * 8) existing scheduled events  (Tech talks, CREDIT showcase, IRC office hours)
 * 9) Tech News
 * 10) Seek out existing information to share
 * 11) Interesting/quirky projects
 * 12) Metrics
 * 13) Current discussions around design/development decisions that will impact people who use MediaWiki
 * 14) Facts about MediaWiki and related tech
 * 15) New developments as they come along
 * 16) Optional: search "MediaWiki" to find more potential news.
 * 17) Twitter: "Top" results are usually enough. "All" tends to be too noisy.
 * 18) Google+: "All" is good enough as there is little noise.
 * 19) Sync the relevant posts with Template:MediaWiki_News.
 * 20) Usually taking the @MediaWiki Twitter timeline as a basis works.
 * 21) Sync the relevant posts with the other channels.
 * 22) Ideally, anything posted at Template:MediaWiki_News should be posted in all channels - or at least at posted to Facebook.
 * 23) It is okay to have differences between channels, e.g. Twitter tends to have more RTs that are not worth re-posting in other channels.


 * Maintained by Rachel Farrand, Chris Koerner, and Quim Gil.

Sharing your updates
If you mention "@MediaWiki" in your posts and we see it from our replies / connections, then we will consider sharing it our timeline.

No promises are made. Even less certain is if you use !MediaWiki or #MediaWiki since we can't monitor those systematically (especially the latter in Twitter).

No extra work will be done to spread your update to other channels. Looking at the workflow you can see what you get automatically by posting in each channel.

Following
From @MediaWiki we follow other official accounts closely related to MediaWiki, to promote them and share their updates easily.


 * @Wikipedia - showing our link to the MediaWiki based project everybody knows.
 * @Wikimedia - we are part of the Wikimedia movement.
 * @wikisignpost - includes a weekly technology report featuring MediaWiki news.
 * @wikimediatech - technical news from Wikimedia software projects
 * @WikimediaMobile - mobile tech updates.
 * @wikimediaatwork - a majority of job postings are MediaWiki related.
 * @wikimedia_sal - relays the server admin log (infrastructure maintenance by Wikimedia Site Reliability Engineering).

We can also follow your MediaWiki Groups accounts.

Statistics
See Social media/Statistics if you like looking at outdated ancient statistics.