I'm going to second Liam's comment here, it is disappointing that we're discussing this here but the Foundation is not coming to the party and explaining why they are doing these things. They're creating an information void, and a void *will* be filled somehow; if the WMF is not proactive in filling it with the real story, it'll be filled with rumours and misinformation, the sort of stuff that inhibits the movement from achieving its goals. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a reasonably prompt answer to the sort of questions being posed here in a respectful fashion.
I've copied in Megan Hernandez, the Director of Online Fundraising in the hope of getting a comment, just in case she's not aware of this discussion.
Cheers, Craig Franklin
On 27 November 2014 at 21:44, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
This notwithstanding, I think the issue *yet again*, is a lack of communication with the relevant community members when a decision is taken that affects them. In this case, at minimum, the French OTRS team - who are apparently receiving complaints that Wikipedia is affected by a virus!
So can I reiterate my reqeust from the other day: If you're going to change something, tell the affected people before you change it (or as soon as possible afterwards). Please don't wait for the public to raise concerns with volunteers, who then complain to the WMF, before offering an explanation.
And on that note, regarding the fundraising concerns from last week, have the Dutch or Russian communities received responses to their questions yet?
-Liam
On 27 November 2014 at 11:35, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
You know, I think I'll pass on the actual content of the message that
talks
about "Commercial" not being a "Monster" and "The Bad". (and yes I know, these are in a negative sentence but... seriously?).
This banner looks like an obituary I find. Where are the cool banners on green leafy foresty background? Those were the days ;)
I know that a lot of thought goes into crafting the best messages for fundraising banners, I also know that the testing is thorough, and decisions are made with real data. But sometimes I find we might be forgetting the number of people we actually scare *away* with things like this. Not sure that's data we can acquire, but looking at this banner I
am
losing faith in my fellow French if they really respond to something like this more than they do to positive and cheerful looking messages).
*sigh*
Delphine
On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 11:44 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Didn't we have the lightbox argument last year?
Probably. Or the year before. Or the year before that. I did say
"(again)"
in the subject line. ;-)
There are various discussions popping up across Wikimedia about these banners. It didn't help that a bug earlier this week caused logged-in users to be hit with them as well. Talk about eating your own dog food.
The French Wikipedia held what appears to be a straw poll with overwhelming denouncement of the banner. It's also been repeatedly described as a phishing attempt. Complaints and confusion aren't
uncommon
during any annual fundraiser, but I think we can and should hold
ourselves
to a higher standard when begging people for money.
As pointed out on Meta-Wiki's "Wikimedia Forum" by Jules78120, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Usage_guidelines is
pretty
clear that the (primary) goal is that banners "be as unobtrusive as possible." I wrote this in May 2011, I believe deliberately outside of
the
annual fundraising that takes place in December so that we could have a calm and reasonable discussion about appropriate CentralNotice usage.
Sigh.
MZMcBride
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