Submissions/How can the Wikimedia Blog help you?

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 2076

Title of the submission: How can the Wikimedia Blog help you?

Type of submission: Discussion

Author of the submission: Fabrice Florin

E-mail address: fflorinwikimedia.org

Username: Fabrice Florin (WMF)

Country of origin: USA

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): Wikimedia Foundation

Personal homepage or blog: fabriceflorin.com

Abstract

The Wikimedia Blog was relaunched in July 2014, to serve as a global communications channel for the Wikimedia movement. Since then, a broader Wikimedia community and the foundation have used it effectively to share a wide range of stories, from community news to tech updates and human-interest profiles. The WMF Communications team invites your feedback on how to use this central movement communications hub in coming years.

In this session, we will start with a short overview of how the blog works now, with findings from recent research studies about which stories are viewed the most and what survey respondents are interested in.

Here are first examples of the data we will share about the blog:

Together, we published 306 new blog posts in 2014 (about one post per weekday)
The blog was viewed over 8.6 million times in 2014, or an average of 23k views per day.
About 84,589 monthly unique visitors viewed the Wikimedia blog in December 2014.
Most blog visitors in December 2014 came from the United States. Other top 5 countries included the U.K., India, Germany and Canada.
The top referring sites in the last quarter of 2014 were: Facebook, the Wikimedia Foundation, Hacker News, Twitter and Reddit
Topics attracting the most traffic included technology updates (HHVM and Phabricator) and launches of new policies (Privacy Policy and Terms of Use)

We will then discuss next steps for the Wikimedia Blog, inviting suggestions from participants, with questions like:

How can the blog help you?
How can it better serve the Wikimedia movement?

What type of content should we focus on? Here are some directions we're considering:

Better content, with focus on quality
More content, with focus on quantity
General-interest stories, with broader appeal
Special-interest stories, with deeper focus

Which topics should we cover more on the blog? Here are some popular categories:

Community news
Foundation reports
Human-interest stories
Movement-wide issues
Tech / product updates

What new types of content should we experiment with? Here are some ideas:

Community picks - favorite articles or images on a given theme (e.g. 'love')
How-to's - short videos with tips on how to use Wikipedia
Insights - inspiring quotes and images from our users
In the news - roundups of articles on top news stories
Social roundups - posts from our followers on Facebook and Twitter
Tech reports - stories on new software / hardware developments
Wikipedia highlights - new or trending articles and images

We will discuss these and other ideas as a group, as well as summarize what readers have already told us.

To help us prepare for this session, we invite you to take this short blog survey, which closes on March 10.

We look forward to improving the blog based on what you and others tell us, to better support our communities.

Note: We also invite you to participate in these separate, but related sessions:

Track: WikiCulture & Community

Length of session: 30 minutes (if time allows, we would appreciate another 30 minutes for a more productive discussion, for a total of 60 minutes)

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional): to be added later

Special requests: It would be great if we could move the chairs in a semi-circle, so participants can face each other during the discussion period.

Interested attendees

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Ocaasi (talk) 18:06, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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