Talk:Social media

A central MediaWiki account edited by humans

A proposal taking into account the discussion without conclusions that took place a year ago:

One account

• http://identi.ca/mediawiki (14 followers on 2012-12-18) is the source for all news related with the MediaWiki community, including Wikimedia Tech.
• Title: "MediaWiki"
• Description: "News from the MediaWiki project. Powering Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement."

Clones

• Replicated to a Twitter account - currently https://twitter.com/#!/MediaWikiMeet (156 followers on 2012-12-18).
• Replicated to this Facebook page?
• Replicated to this new MediaWiki G+ page?

Access

• Sumana and Quim have access right now.
• FIXME We probably need more than this, in terms of more people or a more open workflow.
• FIXME answering feedback in the source and replicas needs also attention.

Aggregated feeds Even if the updates are written mainly manually, we can have some evident feeds aggregated to save work:

• http://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/
• Open to MediaWiki specific categories of known community members with high signal vs noise ratio.

Following

• Wikimedia.
• MediaWiki groups. Qgil (talk) 17:52, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

How would https://twitter.com/WikimediaMobile factor into this? Tfinc (talk) 18:24, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

In a perfectly consistent world a MediaWiki Group Mobile would exist and they would adopt @WikimediaMobile under their scope.  :)

While that happens... It is a "Wikimedia" account but it has a nice % of MediaWiki / technical content. We can just follow it from this main account. Qgil (talk) 18:29, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

About the bot driven @wikimediatech

About https://identi.ca/wikimediatech & https://twitter.com/wikimediatech

I think they are fine as they are but I want to propose a rename to something based on "MediaWiki". Renaming doesn't affect the current followers at all, so I don't think it's a big deal for them. Just a matter of naming consistency. Qgil (talk) 18:03, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok, if @wikimediatech is only distributing updates about http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ then Chad is right and let's just leave the username as it is.

Still, can the description be perhaps improved?

"Wikimedia Tech Team" (identi.ca) or "Wikimedia Tech Staff" (Twitter) can be confused by outsiders as a place to know about all tech related activities. I wonder how many of the 80 / 535 followers (our highest numbers in any tech related account) fell in this confusion.

What about something more descriptive?

"Wikimedia technical infrastructure updates."

Pointing to the MediaWiki account from the description would be also useful. Qgil (talk) 20:35, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Werdna owns it. Nemo 11:06, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

@mediawiki accounts renamed

We just got both http://identi.ca/mediawiki & https://twitter.com/MediaWiki

They are just the old @MediaWikiMeet accounts renamed. I will start updating wiki pages referring to these accounts. If you still find a mention to @MediaWikiMeet please update it. Thank you! Qgil (talk) 22:31, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Please also update the central list at m:Microblogging handles and don't forget to use the !MediaWiki and !Wikimedia groups/tags. Nemo 11:07, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Good idea, should I list @MediaWiki under "Official handles" or "Projects"? It sounds to me official but I rather check here before since I'm not familiar with that page and how it grew.

About using "!Wikimedia", is that string kept intact when replicating to Twitter? Just wondering about weird strings, and their effects on readers and search engines. Qgil (talk) 16:21, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, probably "official".

!Wikimedia is translated to #Wikimedia when forwarded to Twitter. Nemo 07:13, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

How to connect G+?

Currently we post at identi.ca and from there it replicates automatically to Twitter.

Twitter allows you to connect to a Facebook page, and I'm trying to find out who is behind https://www.facebook.com/mediawikiorg to connect both.

Now... how to reach the G+ page automatically? Qgil (talk) 23:19, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Merging Facebook pages

I just created https://www.facebook.com/MediaWikiProject . Then I (re?)discovered this other page that has all the popularity but seems to be unmaintained. I actually confused it with this other one claiming to be official, to which I had posted but I wasn't getting a reply... An on top of this there is this other page looking automatically generated, a Mediawiki developers group and perhaps more.

Anyway, discussion to merge or coordinate all these source is welcome. Qgil (talk) 18:51, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

We had reported the duplicated MediaWiki pages and Facebook took action! I just noticed that the two unmaintained and reported pages don't exist anymore. Yay!

Now the only duplicated is this one but is generated by Facebook themselves. In all fairness it doesn't seem to show up in search results or suggestions when you type @MediaWiki.

Good! Qgil (talk) 17:01, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

app.net

This is for brainstorming how we can use app.net. app.net allows 256 characters, which allows a little more flexibility, as well as images and videos (through oEmbed). Actually arbitrary annotations (metadata) can be used, but of course viewers will probably not support more obscure ones.

Another advantage of app.net is that there is currently a significant contingent of early adopters and developers, exactly the people who might be willing to contribute to MediaWiki. Superm401 - Talk 05:06, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Very good, and thank you for your offer to help spreading MediaWiki news. I'm not a user of app.net so please bare with my basic questions. The first one: how should we start? Is the first step creating a new (paid) account or is there a concept like a "page" handled by an account, like Facebook and Google+ have?

The next step would be to create the MediaWiki place. For that you could use media:Mediawiki logo reworked 2.svg and the description used at https://twitter.com/MediaWiki

Then for posting we could start with the simplest: follow any of the MediaWiki social channels and just re-post in app.net. By default we use exactly the same text everywhere, however a sometimes Facebook/Google+ get a bit more extended text if an important detail didn't fit in the 140 chars of identi.ca/twitter. Qgil (talk) 15:36, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there are just accounts, not separate pages. It sounds like one option is to start by reposting from Facebook, since that isn't limited to 140. We need to figure out what to do if it exceeds 256, though. Superm401 - Talk 20:02, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

So this means that someone has to pay for creating an account... I read somewhere that there was a promotion for existing users to bring someone in for free. Maybe you want to start with that? Then we can see in future months whether it's worth or not. Qgil (talk) 20:10, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I can invite the account and do a one-month free trial. I'll wait until I've decided how to do the reposting. Superm401 - Talk 20:19, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

They've switched to a freemium model (there is a limit to the number of people you can follow, but not the number who can follow you). I've signed up as @mediawiki and made a couple posts, based on the identi.ca feed. Going forward, I am planning to use this flow ( have the accounts hooked up):

Identi.ca->Yahoo Pipes->IFTTT->Buffer

Yahoo Pipes lets me remove the mediawiki: prefix from the identi.ca RSS feed. Then, IFTTT posts it to Buffer. Once I'm confident it's working correctly, I can set Buffer to automatically post, while still being able to go in and tweak the text manually while it's still in the buffer.

However, we can replace this flow if we come up with something better. Superm401 - Talk 11:01, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Great! Can you please add the app.net details to the Social media page? Also note that for the rest of channels we are using this logo. Qgil (talk) 18:22, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I've updated both. Superm401 - Talk 02:56, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Facebook page name

Why https://www.facebook.com/MediaWikiProject? https://www.facebook.com/MediaWiki is empty right now. Bennylin (talk) 12:35, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

"MediaWiki is not available" says Facebook admin interface when trying to rename the current page.

It was the name of an old, unmaintained page that we reported. Facebook took that page down but the URL (username) is not available. Qgil (talk) 14:30, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for clearing up, and too bad someone squat on it first :/ Bennylin (talk) 10:47, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Co-maintainers needed

After more than a month posting on our social media channels and syncing with News I have got now an established routine. I plan to document it this week here. Now I would welcome some help. Having only one person doing this work is risky.

Next week I'm having my Winter holidays and I'm still thinking what to do. Probably post some news from some wifi hotspot every other day... Let's say that it would be nice to have at least another person covering me around July, when the next round of holidays will come. In the meantime we could start distributing work e.g. weekdays / weekends. I'm flexible to any ideas. Qgil (talk) 14:02, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Feel free to send me a link to your documentation. I know my way around Wikimedia-related social media channels, so if you tell me what you usually post and when, I can try to take it over for the week, and see how it goes. guillom 13:01, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! I have updated [[1]] and now I will look at permissions / passwords in these sites. Qgil (talk) 18:03, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Social media stats

Just a heads up about the Facebook, Twitter an Google+ stats we are publishing periodically at Talk:Community metrics. We still don't know what to do with them. Ideas welcome. Qgil (talk) 17:04, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank for information you Thank for you 05:36, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank for information you Thank for you 05:38, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Clarification

I don't understand the following sentance, could someone please clarify what it means: "Careless use can fragment communities, draining away free content and public contacts to social media platform owners' frequently closed and commercially-driven environments." Sabelöga (talk) 09:08, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Never mind, read it again some time later and got it now. Sabelöga (talk) 09:37, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Should there be a mastodon/activitypub account?

Currently mastodon has reached about 1% users compared to twitter, the platform isn't centralized and rather a federation of different sites. Should WM have an account there? Or is it too small, complicated or just not worth having an account there? --~ Greatder (talk) 09:38, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I believe that it should. Its reach has increased significantly since your last comment about it, especially with Threads stating that they intend to federate. Rokejulianlockhart (talk) 10:58, 20 April 2024 (UTC)