[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[SlimVirgin]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 18:11, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 March 2011 00:03, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>> Andrew Garrett wrote:
>>> We might be growing, but I don't think anybody in the industry would
>>> hesitate to say that we're still "small" and "running on a shoestring
>>> budget". The websites that we compete with run budgets in the hundreds
>>> of millions to billions of dollars.
>>
>> Which websites would those be? I can't think of any websites that Wikimedia
>> is competing with that have budgets on the scale of millions or billions of
>> dollars, but I'm probably just being daft.
>
> "Compete" is probably the wrong word. I think Andrew means sites that
> have a similar number of users.
>
We're non-commercial and supposedly run by volunteers, so there's no
point in comparing us to those sites. The point is that we seem to be
raising more money than we need, which is arguably unfair to donors,
then not spending it in ways that increase quality or help the
volunteers, which is arguably unfair to us. That's causing bad
feeling. Whether it's fair or not is beside the point. The bad feeling
is fairly widespread, and is only going to get worse.

Therefore, it would be great if the Foundation could discuss what we
can do about this -- how we can bridge the gap between perceptions --
rather than people telling us we're wrong, which doesn't help.

Sarah