...okay, this is weird.
Any non-logged-in user now gets a randomly selected message displayed in quite small text in the upper right - "Find out more about navigating Wikipedia" or "Learn how to use Wikipedia for research".
Anyone know when we started doing these, and why? It seems fairly cluttering and quite hard to notice - I think I only picked it out because I've been staring at the UI for too many years!
2008/5/8 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
Any non-logged-in user now gets a randomly selected message displayed in quite small text in the upper right - "Find out more about navigating Wikipedia" or "Learn how to use Wikipedia for research". Anyone know when we started doing these, and why? It seems fairly cluttering and quite hard to notice - I think I only picked it out because I've been staring at the UI for too many years!
Ages, I think. Used to be a donation beg notice, now cycles through various things. (Is there a way to switch it on for logged-in editors?)
- d.
2008/5/8 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2008/5/8 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
Any non-logged-in user now gets a randomly selected message displayed in quite small text in the upper right - "Find out more about navigating Wikipedia" or "Learn how to use Wikipedia for research". Anyone know when we started doing these, and why? It seems fairly cluttering and quite hard to notice - I think I only picked it out because I've been staring at the UI for too many years!
Ages, I think. Used to be a donation beg notice, now cycles through various things. (Is there a way to switch it on for logged-in editors?)
There's *also* a donation-beg notice in the upper left, aligned flush above the tabs, which vanishes when logged in as well. Hmm.
This one just seems a lot untidier than the begging notice. I wonder if - once we get a better fundraising flow - it might be best to drop the begging notice and move this into its place...
On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
Any non-logged-in user now gets a randomly selected message displayed in quite small text in the upper right - "Find out more about navigating Wikipedia" or "Learn how to use Wikipedia for research".
[snip]
There's *also* a donation-beg notice in the upper left, aligned flush above the tabs, which vanishes when logged in as well. Hmm.
This one just seems a lot untidier than the begging notice. I wonder if - once we get a better fundraising flow - it might be best to drop the begging notice and move this into its place...
Oh how short our memory is: Those same notices were there for much of 2007 and a top of the page donation notice has been on English Wikipedia for several years.
They got taken down during the fundraiser after Erik requested it on 11/13/2007, a request which made a lot of sense to me.
I pinged some people about restoring the notices in January .. but it was thought it would be a good idea to give a couple weeks breathing room after the fundraiser... Well, it seems that no one remembered to bring the beg notice back.
Last year outside of fundraisers the monthly 'run rate' donation average was something around 50k/month. Last month there was only 19.5k donated through the online system. I thought this was rather alarming and I went and rung bells about it earlier in the week.
If the decline was due to the lack of the prominent notice on EnWP then the foundation would have lost a rather considerable amount due to this oversight (add up the difference over a couple of months..!) ,... but part of the decline was probably due to general economic conditions. It's hard to say what the impact was because the rate of donations has historically been pretty noisy, though I suppose it will be more clear in a few weeks. ... Although the first couple days of the notice being restored show >2x the donations vs the week before so.. ::shrugs:: then again just about any change in how we're requesting donations causes a big short term spike.
Obviously having the best looking and least obtrusive behavior is desirable, but something which generates tens of thousands of dollars a month in donations is not something that should be toyed with lightly. ;) (Though feel free to send me $30k/month if you think it's an unimportant sum .... ;) )
(Beyond just measuring the income, the anon notices can be expected to have other important positive results that are harder to measure... like increasing public awareness that Wikipedia is run by a charity, etc)
2008/5/8 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
(Beyond just measuring the income, the anon notices can be expected to have other important positive results that are harder to measure... like increasing public awareness that Wikipedia is run by a charity, etc)
This is actually very important - that's why the copyright notice at the bottom of every page on en:wp just happens to detail precisely what Wikimedia Foundation is (at the suggestion of the comcom). That all the wikilinks in that notice don't end up topping the wikicharts suggests hardly anyone gets that far down the page ...
- d.
Incidently, I went through the past few months data from http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22
dec 712 000 Jan 120 000 fev 23 000 mars 36 000 april 19 000
Indeed, it will be interesting to see if switching on the banner again make a difference or not.
Ant
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
Any non-logged-in user now gets a randomly selected message displayed in quite small text in the upper right - "Find out more about navigating Wikipedia" or "Learn how to use Wikipedia for research".
[snip]
There's *also* a donation-beg notice in the upper left, aligned flush above the tabs, which vanishes when logged in as well. Hmm.
This one just seems a lot untidier than the begging notice. I wonder if - once we get a better fundraising flow - it might be best to drop the begging notice and move this into its place...
Oh how short our memory is: Those same notices were there for much of 2007 and a top of the page donation notice has been on English Wikipedia for several years.
They got taken down during the fundraiser after Erik requested it on 11/13/2007, a request which made a lot of sense to me.
I pinged some people about restoring the notices in January .. but it was thought it would be a good idea to give a couple weeks breathing room after the fundraiser... Well, it seems that no one remembered to bring the beg notice back.
Last year outside of fundraisers the monthly 'run rate' donation average was something around 50k/month. Last month there was only 19.5k donated through the online system. I thought this was rather alarming and I went and rung bells about it earlier in the week.
If the decline was due to the lack of the prominent notice on EnWP then the foundation would have lost a rather considerable amount due to this oversight (add up the difference over a couple of months..!) ,... but part of the decline was probably due to general economic conditions. It's hard to say what the impact was because the rate of donations has historically been pretty noisy, though I suppose it will be more clear in a few weeks. ... Although the first couple days of the notice being restored show >2x the donations vs the week before so.. ::shrugs:: then again just about any change in how we're requesting donations causes a big short term spike.
Obviously having the best looking and least obtrusive behavior is desirable, but something which generates tens of thousands of dollars a month in donations is not something that should be toyed with lightly. ;) (Though feel free to send me $30k/month if you think it's an unimportant sum .... ;) )
(Beyond just measuring the income, the anon notices can be expected to have other important positive results that are harder to measure... like increasing public awareness that Wikipedia is run by a charity, etc)
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On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 8:23 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
...okay, this is weird.
Any non-logged-in user now gets a randomly selected message displayed in quite small text in the upper right - "Find out more about navigating Wikipedia" or "Learn how to use Wikipedia for research".
Anyone know when we started doing these, and why? It seems fairly cluttering and quite hard to notice - I think I only picked it out because I've been staring at the UI for too many years!
I've always thought it's a great idea to have information prominently placed on how Wikipedia works and how it can be improved - with more and more people turning to Wikipedia for information, 'Wikipedia literacy' becomes increasingly important. However, I do agree these notices are pretty cluttered - I've uploaded an example screenshot (viewed on mac with Safari) at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sitenotices090508.jpg.
Cormac
2008/5/9 Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com:
I've always thought it's a great idea to have information prominently placed on how Wikipedia works and how it can be improved - with more and more people turning to Wikipedia for information, 'Wikipedia literacy' becomes increasingly important. However, I do agree these notices are pretty cluttered - I've uploaded an example screenshot (viewed on mac with Safari) at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sitenotices090508.jpg.
Yeah, not the best. Does it clash with geographical information as well there? We need some l33t design sk1llz applied to this. Monobook looks very nice, but could easily rot ...
- d.
These would look a lot better with proper whitespace, etc. (It's the same reason people hated the no-free-image placeholders; they were terribly designed. That's not why people *thought* they hated them.) Let me know if you want me to tweak it a little.
On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 2:34 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/9 Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com:
I've always thought it's a great idea to have information prominently placed on how Wikipedia works and how it can be improved - with more and more people turning to Wikipedia for information, 'Wikipedia literacy' becomes increasingly important. However, I do agree these notices are pretty cluttered - I've uploaded an example screenshot (viewed on mac with Safari) at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sitenotices090508.jpg.
Yeah, not the best. Does it clash with geographical information as well there? We need some l33t design sk1llz applied to this. Monobook looks very nice, but could easily rot ...
- d.
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