On 31 December 2011 14:42, Zack Exley zexley@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everyone -
It's a trade off between doing things that might annoy some people in the banners vs. reducing the number of days we need to run banners at all. It's hard to find the right balance.
This banner isn't just annoying, it is untrue. You can make a tax deductible donation tomorrow just as easily as you can make it today. It will get deducted off next year's taxes, not this year's, but unless you are trying to reduce your tax bill to zero that makes absolutely no difference.
It is also misleading to claim that donations are required to keep Wikipedia free when you've already raised more than enough to cover core spending. There is no way anything that would be considered making Wikipedia "unfree" would be done if there were no further donations. All that would happen is a few non-core programmes would have to be cut or downsized.
I'm pretty sure I raised both these concerns last year when you ran similar banners and they were never addressed other than to say that such banners raise a lot of money (which is the point - they are misleading people into donating a lot of money). Could you explain how you justify misleading your donors in this way?