[Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.

[Thomas Dalton]

On 31 December 2011 14:42, Zack Exley <zexley at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone -
>
> It's a trade off between doing things that might annoy some people in the
> banners vs. reducing the number of days we need to run banners at all. It's
> hard to find the right balance.

This banner isn't just annoying, it is untrue. You can make a tax
deductible donation tomorrow just as easily as you can make it today.
It will get deducted off next year's taxes, not this year's, but
unless you are trying to reduce your tax bill to zero that makes
absolutely no difference.

It is also misleading to claim that donations are required to keep
Wikipedia free when you've already raised more than enough to cover
core spending. There is no way anything that would be considered
making Wikipedia "unfree" would be done if there were no further
donations. All that would happen is a few non-core programmes would
have to be cut or downsized.

I'm pretty sure I raised both these concerns last year when you ran
similar banners and they were never addressed other than to say that
such banners raise a lot of money (which is the point - they are
misleading people into donating a lot of money). Could you explain how
you justify misleading your donors in this way?