Hi all, happy Friday. I'm a member of the foundation's online fundraising team and wanted to add a few points and answers to this good discussion. I'll use bullet-points to separate each topic:
- For clarification, this was a 1-hour test that ran from 15 to 16 UTC on Wednesday. We haven't adopted this style. And in terms of donor conversion, this banner variant lost to our control.
- As Lodewijk stated above, we were interested in this test precisely because various community members have asked us to bring our banner more inline with the rest of Wikipedia's content. We have adopted elements of the MediaWiki OOjs UI and are interested in doing more.
- This banner only ran for desktop and laptop users; not mobile or tablet.
- We do not deliberately delay the loading of our banner content to draw attention to it and, generally, we try to minimize browser reflow as much as possible. CentralNotice simply loads after the rest of the page.
- Thank you for the feedback regarding the copy you saw, from tone and pronoun usage to themes. We want to craft messaging that accurately represents the mission and values of Wikipedia while allowing us to hit our fundraising goals. Your comments matter and will continue to help guide the development of our appeals.
sam
On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 5:37 AM, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au wrote:
Peter,
Fair enough, I agree that the idea that Wikimedia would have been a success if it'd be made commercial is crazy. "Has it crossed my mind how much we could have made if it had ads? Sure. But it wouldn’t be the same." reads to me as just a hypothetical "if it were as it is today *and* had ads", rather than any serious suggestion that that would ever have been the case. I reckon it makes sense to the non-editor people it's aimed at.
Anyway, about my grammar nickpicking? ;-)
—Sam
On Thu, 24 Aug 2017, at 05:06 PM, Peter Southwood wrote:
Sam, I can't get back to the banner for some reason, so I risk misquoting it. Please take this into account. What I find offensive is the implication that the foundation would even have Wikipedia if they were doing it commercially. I and a significant number of other contributors would not have helped make it what it is today if it had been a commercial site. To support this opinion, there do not appear to be any commercial projects of this type even vaguely approaching the success of Wikipedia. The banner implies that there would be a roughly equivalent project available to sell. This I find offensive as it denigrates the voluntary contributions done by all the unpaid contributors. I see this as misrepresentation and disrespect to the crowd that is the source of the product, therefore offensive. It is possible that I am alone in this opinion, but I suggest that a survey of the people who actually created and maintain the content of Wikipedia would show that I am not. At this point, I suggest that WMF do just that, run a survey to find out who builds the encyclopaedia, and how they feel about this. The golden rule of crowdsourcing is don’t alienate the crowd, especially when they are doing your work for free. The one thing we ask in return for our work is a little recognition and respect, and to know that we do a thing intrinsically worth doing. Again, I realise I do not necessarily speak for everyone, but suspect that I speak for many. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sam Wilson Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 10:26 AM To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] New style banner - A heads up
"Offensive" seems a bit over the top! Who's it offending? Seems pretty okay to me, personally. :-)
Anyway, the only thing I notice with it is that it starts with "We will..." and then says "When I made..." etc. Shouldn't these pronouns agree?
—Sam.
On Thu, 24 Aug 2017, at 04:07 PM, Peter Southwood wrote:
The old style is excessively large and in your face. The new style is almost, but not quite as bad. The content remains offensive and misleading Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Joseph Seddon Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2017 5:02 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] New style banner - A heads up
Hey Wikimedia-l
Apologies for the short notice.
I wanted to give you a heads up on a banner test that will soon be going live.
We've been working on a new style of banner that is specifically designed to have the same native look and feel as the rest of the site and interface. It's intended to be understated and you'll see is very different to our currently best performing banner:
Current: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein?banner=B1718_0823_en6C_d sk_p1_lg_dsn_cnt&force=1&country=US&uselang=QA
New Native feel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein?banner=B1718_ 0823_en6C_dsk_p1_lg_dsn_native&force=1&country=US&uselang=QA
Any feedback is welcome.
Regards
-- Seddon
*Advancement Associate (Community Engagement)* *Wikimedia Foundation* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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