Social media

---

If you're looking to add social features to your MediaWiki installation, please see social toolssocial tools 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?).

MediaWiki

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

• @MediaWiki at Twitter
• MediaWiki at Facebook - see weekly stats.
• +MediaWiki at Google+

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

wikimediatech

These accounts are run by a bot offering the server admin log at http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/

• @wikimediatech at Twitter.

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 Technical Collaboration 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. Chris Koerner and Rachel Farrand can help share information from the MediaWiki accounts.

1. We post to each account separately. Automation / aggregation isn't worthwhile, currently.
   1. Look at explicit mentions and replies.
      1. Share if appropriate, using the functionality of the service, e.g. don't type "RT" in Twitter.
      2. 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.
   2. Technical Collaboration tires to post to the social media accounts at least 3 times a week. We want to ensure folks know that the MediaWiki (and related tech) is an active community.
   3. We pick from multiple sources. Here's a few places we look for things to share.
   4. Look at the timeline. Share if there is anything technically relevant.
   5. Pull from existing sources
      1. existing scheduled events (Tech talks, CREDIT showcase, IRC office hours)
      2. Tech News
   6. Seek out existing information to share
      1. Interesting/quirky projects
      2. Metrics
      3. Current discussions around design/development decisions that will impact people who use MediaWiki
      4. Facts about MediaWiki and related tech
      5. New developments as they come along
   7. Optional: search "MediaWiki" to find more potential news.
      1. Twitter: "Top" results are usually enough. "All" tends to be too noisy.
      2. Google+: "All" is good enough as there is little noise.
2. Sync the relevant posts with Template:MediaWiki_News.
   1. Usually taking the @MediaWiki Twitter timeline as a basis works.
3. Sync the relevant posts with the other channels.
   1. Ideally, anything posted at Template:MediaWiki_News should be posted in all channels - or at least at posted to Facebook.
   2. 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.
• @WikimediaMobile: mobile tech updates.
• @wikimediaatwork: a majority of job postings are MediaWiki related.
• @wikimediatech: advertising the Wikimedia infrastructure activity.

We can also follow your MediaWiki Groups accounts.

Statistics

Facebook

As admin of the MediaWiki page in Facebook I'm getting these weekly stats. Not sure what should we do with them, but sharing is caring:

Week	New Likes	Talking About This	Weekly Total Reach	Total Likes
2013-01-02	8	12 -52.0%	357 -14.4%	54
2013-08-28	14	20 -47.4%	75 -38.5%	1037
2013-09-04	25	36 +80.0%	98 +30.7%	1068
2013-09-11	29	40 +21.2%	233 +113.8%	1094
2013-09-18	15	16 -60.0%	238 +2.1%	1111
2013-09-25	21	30 +87.5%	368 +54.6%	1129
2013-10-02	23	30 00.0%	797 +116.6%	1150
2013-10-09	14	21 -30.0%	322 -59.6%	1172
2013-10-16	23	39 -2.5%	294 -8.7%	1191
2013-10-23	23	33 -15.4%	156 -46.9%	1214
2013-11-08	18	36 -5.3%	343 +43.5%	1260
2013-11-13	18	33 -8.3%	220 -30.2%	1269
2013-11-20	22	39 +18.2%	200 -9.1%	1294
2013-11-27	20	28 -28.2%	120 -40.0%	1314
2013-12-11	13	41 +24.2%	148 -11.9%	1347
2014-01-14	21	38 +22.6%	176 +40.8%	1419
2014-02-12	13	36 -10.0%	221 -1.8%
2014-03-05	11	25 +8.7%	148 (+15.6%)	1516
2014-03-12	16	36 44.0%	294 (98.6%)	1527
2014-03-26	27	42 -16%	305 3.0%	1571
2014-04-02	29	265 +531%	20,512 +6,625.2%	1,602
2014-04-09	29	79 -70.2%	3,577 -82.6%	1,616
2016-06-08	10			2,792

Twitter

Same as above, capturing data here while thinking how to present it better, and where.

This is accummulated data at the end of each month.

When	Total tweets	Total followers
December 2012	?	196
September 2013	340	599
December 2013	356	712
June 2016	574	1,709
October 2016	615	1,887

Google+

Same as above, capturing data here while thinking how to present it better, and where.

The Google+ page was Created on 2012-12-20.

This is accummulated data at the end of each month.

When	+1	In circles
December 2012	8	6
September 2013	185	72
December 2013	239	113

meetup.com

Members of the Wikimedia Tech meetup in San Francisco.

Same as above. This is accumulated data at the end of each month.

• August 2013: 384
• September 2013: 411

See also

• meta:Social media
• All Wikimedia microblogging handles.
• All Wikimedia Facebook pages.
• Project:Calendar/How to schedule an event - Best practices for scheduling an event, a part of which is promoting the events to potential audiences.