2011/1/3 Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com:
Thanks for greetings, and even more thanks for such an effort in trying to address the concerns.
Thanks for raising them. I'll pick and choose a bit in my responses or this thread would expand fairly quickly into all different directions, but let me know if you feel I'm ignoring a key point you're making.
As far as I understand your main concern, you view the fundraising practices this year as so disruptive that they distract too much from the main purpose of providing a service to readers. I don't agree with your characterization here:
Well, there's a single "maybe he will consider once" distraction and there's "let's not allow to read the text" distraction. They are different.
I don't think any of the fundraising banners that ran made it substantially harder to access the information that people were coming to look up, and indeed, around 97-99% of people who came to look at an article did just that and nothing else. We unfortunately don't know if some of them closed the page _because_ of the banners, which is something I'd like to track in future. We do know that the delayed banner display (due to e.g. the geo-lookup) caused some people to accidentally click it, which is essentially a bug that needs to be fixed.
As per my earlier note, there are quite a few things we can experiment with to reduce annoyance after the first display of a banner to a user. For example, a reader might get a banner appeal, which also has a prominent "Remind me later" button which disables the banners for some time. If/when they donate, they might get a big "Permanently hide fundraising banners" option. And those preferences should ideally be active across sites.
So, where I would agree with you is that, as generating revenue receives more attention than it ever has before, mindfulness towards the reader experience needs to be more systematically part of the planning than it's ever been as well, so we don't carelessly slide down a slippery slope of annoying, distracting and frustrating our readers. I think the fundraising team deserves more credit for thinking about these issues in 2010 than they're getting, but I also consider it a personal responsibility to ensure this point remains very high on the agenda in our postmortem and planning for the future.
We have been balancing it forever.
Yes, and every single fundraiser in recent memory has had its fair share of internal controversy and criticism, usually related both to the prominence of the banners and the messaging employed. In 2007 Sue even asked Brion to implement a <marquee> tag, which he reluctantly did and which was later removed. ;-) And you may recall the issues with the Virgin Unite logo in 2006. In 2009 we annoyed people inefficiently for a while with banners bearing large slogans that didn't work.
It worked, right?
For some definition of "worked". Yes, WMF and the Wikimedia community have managed to keep WMF sites up and running in the face of staggering and stressful growth, for which you and others deserve much credit. But as you well know, even on the most basic level of our operations infrastructure, many vulnerabilities remain to this day. The recent extended unavailability of database dumps is an example of serious failure, but failures like this happen when an organization is understaffed/underresourced and only able to focus on the immediate, not the longer term. And whether you agree with this or not, WMF's mission extends beyond operating the websites, and it's performed arguably insufficiently poorly in other categories, such as keeping up with a dramatically changing technology environment, and supporting and growing the free knowledge movement world-wide.
Organizations need to think about worst-case scenarios, and work towards avoiding them. On the operations front, worst-case scenarios include serious attempts to destroy data, complete failure of our primary data center, etc. On the technology front, they include being displaced by a technologically disruptive (likely for-profit) competitor. With projects like Knol and Freebase, we've already seen well-funded technologically proprietary projects operating in related spaces, and we'll see more of them in future (and we've seen successful competitors aided by state censorship in China). On the community front, they include stagnation and ultimately decline, which diminishes the utility of our services and makes us more vulnerable to scenarios of being displaced.
Yes, a long-term perspective on our growth needs to take into account both what we've been able to accomplish with far less, and what the cost to our readers is to add prominent pleas for support. But we also need to have enough realism to understand that the position we're in is arguably the result of a fortunate accident of history. This places with us a great degree of responsibility to support Wikimedia projects and the community of purpose behind them as effectively as possible, so as to protect and spread the values and positive social impact they represent. Barely keeping the lights on is not sufficient. To realize this means to be seized with an urgency which is just as real and stressful as the challenges of keeping up with unimaginable early growth.