Isabell Long wrote: You never know. If some of the slogans are cheekily engaging, some would like that. And even if they don't drive donations on their own, they may reduce ad blindness and so raise the effectiveness of the campaign. People are doing some interesting work with auto-optimized ad runs that we could look at adapting for next year. Given our massive amounts of traffic, we could accept a pretty broad range of slogans, and let the system sort out which are the most effective combinations. Money aside, there's something appealing about maximizing community involvement everywhere we can. William

No, self-respect in advertising is about not actually lying about the product, making $$$ by whatever cost effective means is what it's always and *only* been about. The only thing I will say about the current campaign, it's not about Wikipedia Forever, it's about Wikipedia until-the-next-fund-raiser. If it was forever, that might actually be worth contributing to. On 14/11/2009, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- -Ian Woollard

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> Self-respect is a luxury!?! - some commodity to put a price on!?!. A person's attitude toward his self-respect is clearly reflected in how he presents himself. Marc Riddell

on 11/14/09 7:28 PM, Ryan Delaney at ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com wrote: Ryan, your confusing socialism with individualism - they're not in the same universe. Some of the most effective teams I have seen working together are made up of individuals with self-respect, and the ability to respect another. And, yes, there are examples of this working behind the scenes on the guts of this Project - the Encyclopedia - at this very moment. That's the public face this Project needs to emphasize in its public outreach. Marc

Steve Bennett wrote: Hm. I'm not quite sure how you got that from my comment. David pointed us to a variety of clever slogans written by the public. Isabell was speculating that most of them wouldn't work. I'm just saying that we don't have to speculate; we can run all the ones that don't seem blatantly counterproductive, and find out how well they do. Even better, we can automatically optimize which we show and how. That's not to say we can't depart from the most effective options if we want to. But it seems like a good place to start. William

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 9:41 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: ---------- ~~~>>We don't have to speculate if this bacteria can live in low pressure; we can try it. ~~~>It's not easy at all! It will cost trillions to lift the test apparatus into orbit and get it onto a path to mars. Then we have to consider the cost to get the scientists there! ~~~Um. Why not try it in a lab. On Earth. --------- Er. David. Why not test the messages to the extent that doing so is easy, and leave the trouble of the full deployment for messages demonstrated to actually perform? It's also pretty likely that different messages will perform differently in different places. If we were really getting smart about this we should be predicting the most likely clicked message based on which *article* the reader is viewing (based on its categories). ... tracking it separately for different *languages* is an obvious first step. Make it possible to request a particular entry with the right url while it is out of rotation... and put up a browser compatibility checklist. Let the community get test coverage if they want their messages seen, they could do worse than wikimedia's prior "well it worked in safari" testing. And, frankly, if the message is only shown to 1:1000 viewers it would still get good click-testing coverage but if it caused some minor hiccups in corner cases the world would not end.

David Gerard wrote: Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting this approach for this year, but for future years. As others have pointed out, you could do this incrementally. If a slogan doesn't test well in its native language, there's no reason to go to the trouble of translating it. And even if it does, it may not be particularly translatable, so I think translating is something could be optional, based either on central expert judgment or the individual judgment of volunteer translators. As to browser testing, I think we should be able to abstract formats from content enough to make sure that the containers get tested thoroughly, while providing enough flexibility to those suggesting content. Quite a lot of people have the skills to come up with a clever line, a clever image, or a basic mix of the two, and those formats would be easy to constrain and browser test. That would leave out some of the more esoteric format possibilities, but I think that's ok; this would still be a step forward in terms of engaging the community and the wider public, and I suspect ad format innovation is anyhow not something where we want to be on the forefront. William