Top areas of interest for Community Health task force recommendations

I agree with your post entirely. I intend to draft a recommendation on Social Networking this week. I'm struggling to get back up to speed today after the holidays but am hoping to feel a bit more inspired and energetic tomorrow. Most of the ground work is done. But where plenty of input is needed is in determining which specific features we would like to see. I think that it would be good to write up some specific features, rather than just say "WMF Board, we think you should implement some sort of social features but we don't have any ideas what they would look like."

I have some sketchy ideas of my own. But I don't use Facebook or MySpace. I have some idea of what sort of features they provide from my reading, but that's never the same as genuine experience.

Some of the ideas floating around my head are:

• Some option to subscribe to / follow other volunteers. The question then becomes what will that mean for the user in practice?

Some ideas (dependent on the idea that you will have some kind of personal 'social features page' to look at, distinct from your user page) are:

• For those people you follow, you can see what they've been editing.
• For those you follow, you can see what they're reading (which I guess might require that each article has an "I read this page" button, which would increase server loads, as would all these ideas I guess).
  • And/or an '"I like this" button which could feed you data about friends liking an article and also generate "trending articles" lists where we can see what articles are currently the most popular reads.
• A faster way to message your 'friends' than navigating to talk page (though it should still be transparent and generate a publicly viewable history).

However, I do feel my ideas aren't that inspired. I sense that there are more exciting things that can be done but are currently out of my reach.

Other things to consider is "Can Social Features help WikiProjects"? Given more time I would have liked to open up a debate with some of the WikiProjects to ask them, as they would know best. It's getting rather late for that now. But we could at least state in the recommendation that such a discussion with the WikiProjects is desirable and that perhaps someone should take a lead in that area. They might benefit from some kind of modular page where they can see what fellow WProj members have been doing, improved communication facilities... all of which I guess would have to mean that joining a Wikiproject would no longer be just adding your name to a list but is somehow built into the software. The downside of this may be that setting up a new Wikiproject becomes more difficult.

Then there's portals. Could portals be more dynamic, showing a list of recent changes to articles claimed under the topic and listing potential 'friends' who identify with the topic?

Which might then lead to the question of; should we distinguish between portals and WProjects? Or could the two concepts be combined? That's only just occurred to me, so it's pure brainstorming.