Facebook and wikimedia

LOL I'll try not to sound so cynical. I think we put together some good recommendations on the community health side, so it's really about turning it into something actionable.

The Facebook idea is good. But it can do a lot of harm if we don't cure the root problems in the community.

A big difference between Facebook and Wikipedia is that each edit is welcome at Facebook whereas a lot of articles and edits are deleted at Wikipedia. Each deletion is like a slap in the face, which is limiting the feel good factor of Wikipedia. At the de:Wikipedia today a lot of articles are moved outside Wikimedia into Wikis at Wikia, while the request for deletion is taking place. So far this is not an official policy and I don´t know if this is changing the bad mood, but it is a remarkable change.

I think there is a strategic question in it too. Today Wikipedia is the only encyclopedic Wiki the public know but maybe Wikipedia will move into the Encyclopedia of higher knowledge. For example Wikia is today the relevant Wiki for fanwikis and there are a lot of Citywikis. Maybe there will be more focused Wikis in the future?

Back to the problems in the community. I don´t know if deleting edits and articles is a software problem (which might be solved one day) or it is a structural problem, because there is only one page for each topic (unlike knol). Another point is that these questions are questions belonging to the editors view on Wikipedia. The readers view is different. Therefore maybe we should not push editing Wikipedia, but reading or for example using commons at Facebook and friends.

For example I have got on my Windows 7 desktop a slide show for some of my own pictures. I don´t know if this is possible, but a slide show of commons-pictures as a Facebook-application might be appealing and if those pictures are saved at Facebook we could save some traffic too.