Post-Project Thoughts

I guess the greatest challenge we faced was to gather a community of contributors. We initailly thought contributors and viewers would naturally come if we just spread the word out onto the forums, but from this experience, we learned that it isn't as simple as that.

What we could have done instead was to focus on a specific niche, like the GIMP community, and let them develop a comprehensive GIMP guide for Photoshop users, then eventually brach out to other software equivalents.

I think our advertising options were limited also because it isn't semester time, when we could have actaully approach IT clubs to contribute. Since it is the inter-semester break season, we had no one to physically approach because these clubs weren't in meeting.

But our advertising efforts were not in vain. Just this morning, I received 2 replies from facebooks contacts agreeing to contribute to the wiki. I dare not keep my hopes up because I have already seen several empty promises when it comes to contributions. Still, I believe this wikia has plenty of potential to grow into a useful "software dictionary".

Mailing List Circulation Not Approved

We joined the Free Software Foundation mailing list in hopes of circulating news of our wiki page to the open source community (and FSF is the biggest of such communities we know). However, it has been days and the newsletter still isn't circulated.

From: Darrell Leong <deepdarkabyss@gmail.com>
Date: June 17, 2011 10:04:37 PM GMT+08:00
To: info-press@fsf.org
Subject: HopOver Wiki (please forward to mailing list)

Calling all Free Open Source Software Supporters!
My team is starting a wiki page to help facilitate software users switch over from proprietary software to open source software. Introducing:
The HopOver Wiki!
The goal of the site is to be a dictionary for users to translate their skills to operate proprietary software to skills for using open source software. The wiki not only introduce free open source software equivalents, but even tool and featural equivalents between each proprietary-open source equivalent pair!
Please visit our site: http://hopover.wikia.com/wiki/HopOver_Wiki
Feel free so read/ contribute!
Support the cause!
Cheers,
The HopOver Team

Will send another email to the admin to see if I can find out why wasn't it approved for circulation. Building a community of contributors sure isn't easy. =(

First Contributor!

We have approached many forums to advertise our site but the general feedback we got was potential contributors get turned off when they see how small the content it. Afterall, who would want to contribute to what looks like a dead wiki? It really is a poverty cycle when it comes to content.

Hence, we have changed our strategy to the "brute force" method by contacting our friends and forum administrators, anyone who knows software, to contribute to the site. Many of them liked the idea and said they might contribute, but ... you know...

However, one person conquered his sloth and created a page! *pops champagne* It was a good page until I realised that most of the content are taken from Open Office wiki (don't worry, it is licensed CC-BY). Nonetheless, this is still a step for us and hopefully, a few more contributions and we can break out of this poverty cycle.

Attracting Contributors - Plan D

Plan D is to create a Facebook page for the wikia. By sharing the page, we are advertising the wikia to all of our Facebook contacts.

Attracting Contributors - Plan C

Plan C is to apply for Wikia Spotlight. However pre-requisite to apply for this requires over 200 pages for wikia to but the site under spotlight.

Attracting Contributors - Plan B

Plan B is to create  "lens" for the site. Squidoo is a site which catalogs other sites. Members (Squids) go around looking out for interesting ideas. If we can get enough Squid likes, we can eventually go higher up the site ranks to achieve more publicity.

Attracting Contributors - Plan A

Plan A is to go to several software related forums to encourage the software community to be part of the wiki.

1) GIMPtalk











2) GIMPforums












We targetted GIMP forums because we already have a decent page on Photoshop to GIMP. If there are people refering to that page, site traffic will increase and hopefully the contributors will come.