Hoi,
Thank you for your reply. I am grateful for the insight that you offered
and find that my notions have mostly aligned. They will align even more as
I consider it further.
There is one other aspect that you miss.. probably quite deliberately.
There are those that consider that Wikipedia is all that counts and English
Wikipedia at that. You find it in the reply "is there a commitment to
saveguard Wikidata", it is however widespread. I find that I have no more
tolerance for the "Wikipedia only" attitude. Yes, the consensus in English
Wikipedia can be what it may but when it is stupid, the consensus is
stupid. It takes good arguments to convince me otherwise.
When you then consider that the cost of "any nine year old child can find
pictures in Commons" has a cost of less than 25.000 Euro. It is mostly
evangelism and separating the existing code from the existing search
functionality. Just consider, with such functionality available, it will be
easier to raise funds globally. What will be left of the 25K is enough to
add functionality to find a building, a tree, a fireman and an ambulance
that is local.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Sat, 25 Sept 2021 at 22:51, Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi,
(Sending this as a personal opinion, albeit one informed by my work on
revenue strategy in the past few years.)
Discussions about fundraising in the Wikimedia movement often involve the
same arguments over time. My theory, after observing and participating in
those discussions for 15 years, is the following.
Objections to Wikimedia fundraising (and, more broadly, revenue
generation) tend to stem from three main sources:
* the moral superiority of financial disinterest
* outlandish budgets and fundraising goals
* improper means used to raise money.
The first one is relatively simple. A significant number of us find any
relationship between money and free knowledge viscerally disgusting. We've
been editing as volunteers for years, devoting our free time to the
advancement of humankind through knowledge. We have done so through
countless acts of selflessness. Our financial disinterest is
inextricably woven into our identity as Wikimedians. The Foundation should
only raise the minimum funds required to "keep the lights on." Anything
more is an attempt to profit from our free labor, and that's revolting.
This is not unlike discussions of business models in the libre software
community; we can also see those arguments surface in discussions around
paid editing. I will leave the moral argument aside, because little can be
done to change individual identities and moral judgments of money. But
let's name them explicitly, in hopes that we can separate them from more
fact-based arguments, if we are willing and able.
The second point of contention is how much we raise. To those of us who
remember the early years ("May we ask y'all to chip in a few dollars so we
can buy our second server?!"), raising $150+ million a year these days
seems extravagant, and probably always will. The much smaller budgets from
our past act as cognitive anchors, [1] and in comparison recent budgets
appear greedily outsized. Instead of being outraged by the growth of the
budget, we should instead ask ourselves how much money we really need.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get
to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is
also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board
understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they
directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be
able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members
of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also
understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding
question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement". [3]
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/Nove…
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working…
People who attended the meeting of strategy working groups in Berlin in
early 2018 might remember a thought exercise led by the Revenue Streams
group. In it, we estimated that coming closer to our vision would probably
require an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion
dollars. There is nothing intrinsically outrageous about that amount, as
long as the money advances the mission efficiently and equitably. The
International Committee of the Red Cross had a global budget of $1.6
billion in 2016.
And that's the heart of the argument about fundraising goals; it's less
about how much we raise, and more about what we spend it on. Moral argument
aside, the problem is rarely that the movement is raising too much money,
but rather that people feel that they're not getting their fair share of
it, whether in cash, attention, support, or something else. At the
Wikimedia Conference in 2018, literally no one wanted to talk about
revenue; very few people wanted to be part of the working group. What
people were arguing over was whom the money should go to, and who should
decide its allocation. If volunteer contributors felt that they were
properly supported with features, tools, and programs, and if affiliates
felt that they had access to the resources they needed to grow their
efforts and impact, I venture that we would all complain a lot less about
the size of our fundraising goals.
This brings us to the problem of impact and accountability. The Wikimedia
Foundation is in the very privileged position of having very little
individual accountability to its donors: the choice of the "small-dollar
donor model," in which an enormous number of people donate very small
amounts of money, makes our financial model extremely robust. But it also
dilutes the accountability to each individual donor.
Nonprofits usually have a much smaller donor base; they need to convince
their donors that their money is put to good use, and that it has the
maximum impact in service of the organization's mission ("the best bang for
the buck"). But we are an unusual nonprofit with the ability to reach
billions of people, and those numbers work in our favor. This is also why
disintermediation (meaning third parties like search engines and smart
assistants providing Wikimedia content directly to people, without sending
them to our sites) is such a risk to the model we have relied on for most
of our existence.
For the most part, and leaving aside major donors, people support us
because we provide them with utility, and they want to give something back
in return. This dynamic frees us from having to woo and please donors, and
enables us to instead work on what we think advances our mission the most.
But it also makes it tempting to assume our impact without really ever
having to prove it. Which means that the impact of movement funds ends up
being a matter of personal interpretation, and we have no shortage of
variety when it comes to individual opinions.
Without direct accountability from donors, who else is left to hold the
movement (and the Foundation) accountable for the impact of our spending?
The Board would be an obvious candidate, but Trustees have historically
encouraged us to spend more, not less. The Global Council might think
differently, but it's still a long way away. And as much as volunteer
communities may demand accountability, the truth is that without mechanisms
to enforce it, their competing claims of authority are just that: claims.
Discussions on this mailing list and elsewhere are a classic example of
the concept of voice, as formalized by Albert Hirschman in his work on
responses to decline in organizations. [4] We are unhappy with a decision
but reluctant to simply exit the group, either because we don't
see an alternative, or because of the sunk costs of emotional investment,
or because of the sense of identity that comes with belonging to the group,
or because ultimately we can live with the decision. And so, with exit not
available as an option, we use our voice instead, even though it has proved
to only have a very limited effect on making different decisions. (And also
because we *do* love to argue.)
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
Of course, it's not difficult to imagine a scenario where fundraising "too
much" could lead us to making bad decisions. Indeed, you don't even need to
imagine it: I wrote just that scenario a few years ago. [5] But that's a
matter of how we spend, not how much we raise. Another reason for caution
is that excessive fundraising might conceivably jeopardize our future
ability to raise funds (the "crying wolf" argument). But it's also likely
that sources of revenue that are available to us today might not be
available to us in the future.
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2018_Revenue_strategy/Futures#2031:_Success…
So now we're left with how we raise money, and the common complaints about
the size, frequency, and tone of fundraising banners. The argument is that
fundraising messages use unduly alarmist language, and that donors are
therefore misled into thinking that Wikimedia is facing imminent danger. I
do believe that not enough credit is given to the people who craft those
messages in banners and emails. These people care an extraordinary amount
about doing the "right thing." They have literally spent years doing A/B
tests to soften the tone and figure out the least alarming language
possible to raise the required amounts. All that while enduring constant
criticism of their work. They are heroes.
But beyond that, there is also a real sense of urgency that the most vocal
of us here generally do not sense. There are very real threats to our
mission, much closer in time than we imagine. [5] Assuming that, just
because we've been around and successful for 20 years, we'll be around and
just as successful for the next 20, is wishful thinking underpinned by
normalcy bias. [6]
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2018_Revenue_strategy/Summary
[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
There's a fine line between thriftiness and privation, and in today's
fast-changing world, denying ourselves the resources we need is harmful to
our mission. As emijrp would argue, there is a deadline, [7] especially if
we look beyond privileged communities and we strive to make up for
historical oppression. The modesty of financial ambitions reflects a
certain privilege and ignores the vast resources required to actually focus
on communities left out by structures of power and privilege. If we are to
live up to our commitment to epistemic justice, we must give ourselves the
financial means to do so. The longer the injustice persists, the more
compounding harm is done. Our work *is* urgent, even if it's not the same
urgency that drives donors.
[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:There_is_a_deadline
In a nutshell: by all means, let's better assess our impact, instead of
just assuming it. And let's discuss accountability mechanisms. But let's
also be realistic about the resources required for a mission as broad as
ours. And let's understand both the urgency of our endeavor, and the
financial demands of our collective promise of Knowledge Equity. Misery is
no more virtuous than opulence if wealth is distributed equitably to
advance our mission.
--
Guillaume Paumier
(he/him)
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