2006/12/28, James Hare messedrocker@gmail.com:
Danny gave a very good speech about this in the Wikimedia IRC channel. He said that since we don't do advertising, we are giving up on tens of millions of dollars a year. Now that we need money, we have Virgin Unite kind enough to offer some really cool matching. Mentioning them in the Sitenotice is our way of saying "thank you for being so awesome."
Danny gave a very rethorical speech about this in the Wikimedia IRC channel. That was the impression of a lot of chatters who don't agree with the use of a commercial logo.
There is a huge difference between "thank a donor for what it did" and "put a commercial logo in Wikipedia home-page". Writing a phrase with "The donations made in this day will be doubled by Virgin. Thanks to Virgin!" is quite acceptable. Putting a logo that's linked to a very, very big and spread commercial reality is not acceptable.
By the way, the way some members of the Board described this deal made it result as a "ad selling": "you double our donations, we will put a logo on our projects". At first, they said there was no deal about the use of the logo; then, they said WMF and Virgin ther has been a "gentleman agreement".
Boh.