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Hi everybody!

So as you may have noticed, we've been running our big year-end fundraiser for Wikimedia. The site keeps getting bigger and more popular, and we need to bring in money to run our servers, keep our internet connection up, and pay the small office and tech staff that keeps things humming so everybody can keep Wikipedia and friends fun and exciting.

But the the visual notices on the site to show people the status of the fundraising have been... not as well organized as we'd like.

In particular, the notices (especially those which mention organizations matching public donations, which are slightly controversial) have not been laid out, shown to the community, and provided to translators ahead of time.

I'd like us to improve that situation, if possible.

The first quick thing I'm doing is to take a more direct hand in the fundraising notices and making sure they're available to translators. I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes, but I would like to get a little more involved with the translators to prepare things for software changes as well as this immediate fundraiser issue. :)

For today only there is a notice about matching donations by Virgin Unite, which hasn't been widely translated yet.

I know, I know, last minute stuff... but in the future there will be others; we will have at least one other matching donor during the course of this fundraising run. If possible I'd like to make sure we have this notice translated more widely by the end of today, and I definitely hope we can have it ready in most languages for the next one, which will happen in a couple of weeks.

I've put a generic one-line matching-donation notice up for translation here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_request/WMF/Fundraising_Sitenotic...

Some wikis probably already have this translated locally, so can be copied back to this master page for later reference. Others maybe haven't updated yet, or are even on an older version altogether.

It's my hope that for the next one we'll be more organized ahead of time and we can get these things to you guys on time.

Thanks to everybody; it's a big help and I hope I can hold up the other end of things when asking for things in the future. :)

Feel free to send me hate mail / love letters. Getting your communities to comment on the form of the notices for the future is also very welcome; we don't want these things to be surprises like they were for many today.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)