On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 2:40 AM, Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's all very well for English Wikipedia, but what about the hundreds of other places? Are you going to add the gadget elsewhere too? -- Alex (User:Majorly)

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 3:21 AM, Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's all very well saying that, but such an obstructive irritatingly large thing is difficult to ignore. Hide should make it hide. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

2008/11/4 Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com>om>: We're looking into the slowness right now - temporarily disabled on en.wikipedia.org. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:54 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote: What better time to run it?!@# It should never make things like watchlists slow, since it should be served 100% out of the front end caches. If it's causing slowness then there is a glitch which needs to be fixed and would likely have resulted in slowness no matter when it was run.

Erik Moeller wrote: So we'll "only" have to put up with a banner with a distracting solid-blood-red blob at the top of pages, which doesn't even go away when you hit "hide", for 2 1/2 months? I don't mind a banner existing, but I do very much mind that it doesn't get hidden, or at least collapse into something small and text-only (without distracting blocks of color!) when I hit the "hide" button. Do you really think harrassing your volunteers is going to make them donate? -Mark

At least have a small text only version for people that are signed in and have selected hide (should hide it completely from the screen to be honest or call it minimize) because its still bigish and draws your attention away from the articles.

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 7:55 AM, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)yahoo.com.au> wrote: Banner doesn't actually hide when hide is clicked, just goes slightly smaller. It needs to be hidden completely when you click hide - otherwise it's not really hiding it. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Elias Friedman <elipongo(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, I got there. I shouldn't have to disable it though. What about people who don't read this list? What about anons who are regular donators? Why should they have to suffer this large banner at the top of every page? Anons don't have gadgets anyway. I preferred it the way it was last time round, less obstructive. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

In addition, the donation window screws up the {{pp-semi-vandalism}} templates, {{UserStatus}} templates, and all of those templates. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Addshore X! On Nov 5, 2008, at 8:31 AM [Nov 5, 2008 ], Casey Brown wrote:

On Nov 5, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Come now. It also has popular and enduring use for Myspaceification of user pages in ways that cause various pretty pictures to appear in positions that block the GFDL link. -Phil

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ugh, yes. Getting rid of that can only be a good thing, not least for the violence it does to a page viewed under anything other than the default skin. What we really need to go alongside disabling absolute CSS positioning is a software-level way of detecting and announcing the protection level (etc) of a page. -- Sam PGP public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/public_key

Elias, you say I have to say this part is not cutting edge. Between 90% and 95% of all online giving to our charity is setting up regular small gifts, people buy the argument that maintenance costs (unlike investment or emergency relief) are ongoing. But several other elements of this campaign aren't very smart, as far as I can see. I wonder if any professional fundraisers were involved (they'll hate me if they were). FAQs like "why should I support WMF" and "what difference will my donation make" for example are rather sadly absent and the "what does this pay for" reads like "go and read the F***ing accounts stupid". Beyond which, banner ads are about three years expired as a way to raise money online. The massively cheapest and most effective way is to hook people out looking to donate to something via Google for which WMF seems completely resource-rich. But they choose to link footers on every page on Wikipedia to a disambig page in en on "charity" rather than to a really good pitch on WMF on why you should give and what our vision is. WMF doesn't even appear in the google search for "open software charity". Oh dear. Andrew On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Elias Friedman <elipongo(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, Casey, sorry missed that one, I am a bit rushed. However please note that the question is not actually answered. It gives a third party fact bite with a tag on "about you": The job of the Wikimedia Foundation is to provide easy access to information, for people all over the world - free of charge, and free of advertising. As a non-profit, it is dependent on your help to do that. Your donations directly support some of the most popular collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's top ten most popular websites and the largest encyclopedia ever compiled in human history. It should say: You should support the WMF to help give better access to free reference to people all over the world. The Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia have been hugely successful in realising an amazing vision of people sharing knowledge. However there is still a long way to go until everyone can have free access to pooled human knowledge, and maintaining what we have already done also costs money. You can be part of our achievements and our vision by donating. When we reworded our charity website in less formal language in 2004 online donations went up by a factor of twenty overnight from the same traffic. It is very important Andrew On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2008/11/5 Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> Gadget tab in your preferences. I appreciate that there may have been thoughts that tonight would be the perfect opportunity to combine the fundraising with the anticipated increase in readership. One should keep in mind, however, that this is the first US presidential election since Wikipedia has become such a popular source of information, and nobody really knew what would happen. We had several articles getting 50K-150K hits/hour. Instead of reaching hundreds of thousands of potential donors, we unintentionally shut out a significant number of them. I will leave it to others to do the cost/benefit ratio. Incidentally, thanks to the folks on the technical side of the house for putting things back together tonight for those of us whose feeds are through the Florida servers. Risker