Wednesday, April 30, 2008

How to get the message out?

When I talk about MediaWiki, I typically think of my audience as people who are editing in a wiki. They need to know that localising is good, that you do it at Betawiki, they are the ones that may help push the WMF into using Semantic MediaWiki in its projects or share my interest in things to do with languages.

When you consider who you are doing it for, this localising, I find there are two groups. The people who localise help themselves because by collaborating at Betawiki, they get better tooling and their work will have an effect in all the WMF projects. These are the easy ones to reach. The second group, the people the organisations that have their own MediaWiki Wikis are much harder to reach.

Today I informed Tactical Tech about our "language pack" and how we provide support for the 1.12 stable release. To me it is important that the MediaWiki that is released in the NGO in a box provides the best that we can do. When NGOs use MediaWiki, more people will know our tool and this may stimulate them to write in the Wikipedia in their language too.

By reaching out to Tactical Tech, I hope to reach many more organisations but I do not reach the NGOs that got MediaWiki from the box already. Messaging in this way does not scale either.

What is the best way to inform the MediaWiki users, the people organisations that have their own wiki?
Thanks,
GerardM

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