Encouring contribution (was Re: Launchpad team management)

[Neal McBurnett]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 08:41:46AM +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> I'm quite concerned at the moment that there is not much contribution in
> the docteam compared to the level of contribution we see in other Ubuntu
> teams, such as development, bug work, marketing etc. It would be nice to
> do some work this cycle on encouraging more contribution to the team.
> 
> The dividing line between the wiki and system documentation which you
> mention is key to that, I think. The former has a much lower barrier to
> entry and we need to ensure the transition between the two is smoother
> than it is now.
> 
> Other things we can try and do are:
> 
> * Improve the visibility of how to contribute - tidy up the team wiki
> pages; link to them more prominently from the help website, etc.

I think having some wiki tracking by user, with metrics, would help.

I'd love to be able to review what I've worked on in the past, go back
and see how those pages are doing, and see if they need more love.

Wikipedia makes that easy.  I've got over a thousand wikipedia edits,
and I can show them off to my friends
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Nealmcb).  I'd
think the doc team managers (and Community Council, when folks are up
for membership) would love to be able to review past contributions.

And I bet we'd see some friendly competition.

I looked for this feature in moinmoin, and see it may not be too hard:
 http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinQuestions

 View all edits from a particular user?

 [Question:] How can I view all contributions to the wiki by a
 particular user or IP address? Can I view a list of my wiki edits? I
 see DeSpam has the ability to query and list all all contributions
 from a user or IP address.

 [Answer:] There is no special code for that yet. 

but note the comments at the bottom of
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DespamAction

> What other ideas do people have about improving contribution?

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/
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