[WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER

[Steve Bennett]

> It is pretty much traditional for the fundraiser to cause controversy,
> in fact. I know how Oleg feels. These days I ignore the ads, since I
> don't see why I should give money well as time: and they are obviously
> aimed at Wikipedia's readers, who outnumber the people seriously
> involved with the site by a factor of 10,000 or more by now. I don't see
> the banner any more: I don't remember dismissing it.

Yeah, they could have avoided the controversy entirely by not showing
them to logged in users.

I also subscribe to the "my tastes are not aligned with the PR
company's tastes, but that's to be expected" line of thinking.

I guess the vague, icky feeling I get (and maybe some others feel) is
that we, the volunteer editing army do all the work creating the
product. But campaigns like this sometimes nudge slightly towards
creating the impression that the WMF is sort of co-opting that product
and marketing it as their own. (I'm deliberately hedging my words a
lot here: "impression", "feel" etc)

Steve