IMO the next logical step would be to find the people who contribute a lot to other support channels (#mediawiki
, Support desk, wikitech-l, Stackoverflow…) and invite them to participate here (or find out why they don’t want to). What do you think?
Identifying and inviting top contributors of other support channels


Agreeing, but not sure how to gather stats (if it’s about specific names and not just a public call) for Support desk and Stackoverflow. For IRC and the mailing list, https://wikimedia.biterg.io/ should help.

For StackOverflow (or Stack Exchange if we want to be thorugh) via the data explorer, for Support Desk just count the contributions in the DB (or find a tool that can handle Flow but I didn’t).

For onboarding part, we could consider sending personalized invites via the discourse’s admin interface. If there is an easy way to identify top contributors / maintainers of projects from within the volunteer community, then targeting them first could be a good first step. At WMF, it might be good first to reach out to team managers.

I never knew about data.stackexchange.com! It’s cool.
Here (with username links) are the usernames of the people who answered the most questions tagged ‘mediawiki’, across all (non-Meta) StackExchange sites (with 20 or more answers):

@samwilson nice, thanks!
If you want to make it more generic, a decent list of Wikimedia-related tags is mediawiki
, mediawiki-api
, mediawiki-templates
, mediawiki-extension
, mediawiki-extensions
, mediawiki-installation
, pywikipedia
, semantic-mediawiki
, wikidata
, wikidata-api
, wikipedia
, wikipedia-api
, wikimedia-dumps
, wikimedia-labs
.

Flow doesn’t seem to be integrated to the history API so I wrote a script for scraping the history page:
tgr@tgr-ThinkPad:~$ cat history.sh
WIKI='https://www.mediawiki.org'
URL='/w/index.php?title=Project:Support_desk&limit=500&action=history'
while [[ -n $URL ]]; do
>&2 echo $URL
curl -s "$WIKI$URL" | xpath -q -e '//div[@class="flow-board-history"]/ul/li/a[@class="mw-userlink"]/bdi/text()' 2>/dev/null
URL=`curl -s "$WIKI$URL" | xpath -q -e 'string(//a[@class="mw-nextlink"][1]/@href)' 2>/dev/null`
done | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
tgr@tgr-ThinkPad:~$ ./history.sh | awk '$1 >= 100'
4989 Ciencia Al Poder
2681 MarkAHershberger
1225 Bawolff
1158 Johnywhy
997 Florianschmidtwelzow
878 Flow talk page manager
623 Malyacko
611 Subfader
578 AKlapper (WMF)
502 星耀晨曦
388 Krinkle
383 TheDJ
338 Tropicalkitty
332 Lieutenant S. Reznov
316 MaxSem
291 Mainframe98
286 Jasper Deng
259 MacFan4000
257 Wargo
248 Zoglun
239 Emufarmers
235 Reach Out to the Truth
230 Fokebox
194 Reception123
150 Waanders
150 Clump
146 Jackmcbarn
143 Stefahn
135 Matiia
133 Shirayuki
133 Cavila
131 Allen4names
122 External Link to Interwiki (Bot)
121 Ricordisamoa
108 FlightTime
106 This, that and the other

It’s doing any tag containing mediawiki (i.e. q.Tags LIKE '%mediawiki%'
) so should be getting all of them.
And nice work with the history scraping.

@samwilson I was mainly thinking of the wikipedia-api
tag which is fairly popular and covers the Wikipedia mashup developer population that AIUI is a target group of DevRel and this site alongside developers creating tools for Wikimedians to use.

Invites do not work with local logins disabled, and in most cases we don’t have the email address anway (and where we do we can just mail them). For MediaWiki users we can use sendBulkEmails.php. I guess we can just ping top IRC users manually. There is no official way to contect StackOverflow users - we could look at the user profiles and hope they have email addresses, or maybe buy an advertisement for the mediawiki
tag.

(Aside: another cool place that’s hard to find is stackapps.)

Good point! I read too hastily. I’ve updated the table above to include mediawiki, wikipedia, and wikimedia tags, as well as links to people’s profiles — it looks like quite a few have some sort of contact info there.

For the records, in some cases, email addresses might be in the database behind wikimedia.biterg.io that srishakatux and I can access.