Casey Brown wrote:
The English Wikipedia is an exeception, we have people
from many different
background and native languages. The text in the banner was *all* comments
made by previous donors to the Wikimedia Foundation (it is exactly what they
said, in whichever language they wrote it in).
* Include some mention of what the fundraising is _for_. I've been here
since forever and it still took me a moment to
realize what was going on
when I first saw it.
This is all linked from that main notice. The main bar links to <
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising> which has a navigation bar
that includes: <
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008
Both of these are needlessly evasive ways of asking for donations.
Neither of them comes out and actually says what the point of the banner
is, and there's no way I'm going to be bothered clicking on a link in a
banner ad when I don't even know what it's for.
* Test out significant interface changes on all of the
available skins,
not just the default one.
I assume this has been done and the problems are probably browser-based, not
related to the skins (too early to know now, the notice just went up
today). But you can contact Brion (brion[at]wikimedia(dot)org) for more
information about this.
I'm using the latest Firefox, which isn't exactly a niche browser and is
generally quite standards-compliant.
I'm not trying to harp and I'm not personally put out by this since I've
made it vanish already with that CSS trick. But I don't think it's a
good idea to dismiss serious concerns like this. The vast majority of
our readers don't even have accounts, or if they do they have no idea
how to tweak their CSS. I've actually done it before to get rid of other
notices I consider annoying and I still didn't think to look at the page
source myself to see if there was a class or id I could blot out.