[Foundation-l] leaflets

Sat Mar 1 21:43:20 UTC 2008

Guillaume Paumier wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>>  Following a question from a french wikipedian, I visited the page on
>>  meta related to leaflets: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet
>>
>>  Many of these leaflets are outdated. Some never went beyond the draft
>>  stage. Some seem to be finished, but were never produced in pdf version.
>>
>>  Is there anyone willing to help finish some of these leaflets ?
>>
>>  Of if projects or chapters have other leaflets being done and not listed
>>  on this page, can someone complete the meta page ?
>>
>>  Thanks
> 
> It is *very* difficult to make such leaflets. And I do know what I'm
> talking about.
> 
> Wikipedia leaflets are the easy part. Wikipedia is the biggest project
> and quite everybody (including people who make the leaflets) know
> quite well how it works. We can do these ourselves (ourselves = people
> who make the leaflets = the marketing committee, mainly Elian and me
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Marketing ).
> 
> For other wikimedia projects it's quite more complicated. I remember
> asking the wikisource community some input last year, because I wanted
> to make a leaflet about their project and I didn't know enough about
> it myself. As a result, I got 10 times more text than what I asked
> for. They gave me an entire step-by-step tutorial ("from the main
> page, click on this, then to create an account do this" etc.) which is
> definitely not the purpose of a leaflet. A leaflet is what you hand
> out in meetings to have people *come* to the website. Its purpose is
> to raise the interest.
> 
> If people are willing to provide help to promote their project, they
> are much welcome. People from the marketing committee will be very
> happy to design and produce high-quality documents *once the text is
> written (or at least drafted) and a selection of images is ready*.
> 
> I have been trying to spread the word that the marketing committee
> (especially me) was really at the service of the community to help
> people promote their projects and create documents. Unfortunately,
> we've had almost no requests. It seems either people don't remember
> us, or they are not willing to do some basic work needed before any
> design. We can't do everything alone. So let me say it once again: if
> you want leaflets, email me, let's discuss what you want exactly, for
> what audience, in what format, etc. Then, do the preliminary work by
> preparing a clear, concise text on meta: I have organised
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet and all its subpages by
> language and by project to make it easier. The design will be the easy
> part.

Perhaps an advertisement on Wikizine ?

> About statistics: we don't have any statistics since Oct. 2006 :
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm . Maybe Greg
> Maxwell, as CRO, has more up-to-date data, but stats.wikimedia.org is
> currently of no help. It's quite difficult to update leaflets if we
> have no new data, given that stats are almost the only thing that
> needs to be updated; the rest of the content doesn't need much update:
> core principles, free content, are still up-to-date and not likely to
> change.

Hmmmm.
The data is available per language, even if not available generally.
So I think the problem is perhaps not the Foundation not providing data, 
but the tool itself. In which case, that would be a question for Erik 
Zachte ?

Ant