Wikimedia Storyboard

The idea of the Wikimedia Storyboard is to develop a fundraising landing page on http://wikimediafoundation.org/ with moderated but up-to-date stories from users and donors explaining the role Wikimedia has played in their lives. The motivation of building such a landing page is that donor and supporter stories can help to convince and persuade people of the impact an organization is having. It's essentially an extended, moderated version of the real-time contribution history.

Quick and dirty mock-ups

Storyboard

The main landing page, with the donor stories to the left, and the donation form to the right. A tabbed interface gives access to the 'submit a story' UI. The storyboard itself both has an "eternal load" paradigm, with new information being loaded as the user scrolls to the bottom, and the ability to permalink stories.

"Share this" would give a perma-link pop-up, and Facebook and Twitter buttons. Bonus points for automatic URL shortening for tweets.

Story submission

The story submission interface, which would be loaded into a tab in the first mock-up. Note that it would give users the ability to upload a personal photo, which would then be previewed, ideally with cropping and scaling functionality as in typical profile selection user interfaces.

E-mail should be in the core fields. We may want to implement e-mail confirmation or a captcha if we get too many useless submissions.

Story review

The story moderation interface. Users with a 'storyboard' permission would be permitted to review, edit, publish, and hide stories. Hidden stories could still be published later; they would simply be available through a separate queue.

Search/navigation could be very basic initially, but the ability to search inside stories (both published and unpublished) would be a nice-to-have feature.

Naturally, the software would have to be fully internationalized. Ideally, we'd store a language field with each story (depending on the UI language, but changeable by admins later to move things into a different queue) so that speakers of different languages can moderate different story queues.

Implementation notes

• In order to retain maximum flexibility regarding story display and submission, it would perhaps be best to implement both features as parser hooks (e.g. <storyboard/> and <storysubmission/>), or as special pages that can be transcluded. The story review interface can be a regular special page.