now that we have blinking banners, I'm sure we should try out how full-screen banners work, with "click to go to wikipedia".
Domas
Domas Mituzas wrote:
now that we have blinking banners, I'm sure we should try out how full-screen banners work, with "click to go to wikipedia".
If you could convince the fundraising folks that it would generate enough money to justify ignoring the complaints, I'm sure it could and would be implemented. That was the gist of the "Wikipedia Executive Director" discussion. It doesn't matter if the banners are problematic and against Wikimedia's principles (like accuracy), if they make enough money, these concerns can and will be set aside.
The more recent banners speak of "urgent" and "critical" funding needs to keep Wikipedia ad-free. However, the money to actually keep the site up and running was raised weeks ago. Misleading readers is acceptable if it can help Wikimedia reach its goal, right?
It's all about money. Principles are dead.
MZMcBride
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
now that we have blinking banners, Domas
Oh! Oh! can we have marquees as well... and those flashy "under construction" gifs?? -Peachey
Awesome!
How about we add popups?
Seriously, if you're going to do this, just add AdSense...it's a heck of a lot prettier.
~~~~
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:10 AM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
now that we have blinking banners, Domas
Oh! Oh! can we have marquees as well... and those flashy "under construction" gifs?? -Peachey
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Mono mium monomium@gmail.com wrote:
Awesome!
How about we add popups?
Seriously, if you're going to do this, just add AdSense...it's a heck of a lot prettier.
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:10 AM, K. Peachey <p858snake@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists@gmail.com> > wrote: > > now that we have blinking banners, > > Domas > Oh! Oh! can we have marquees as well... and those flashy "under > construction" gifs?? > -Peachey
Firstly, this is probably just an experiment to see if it draws more donations. If it doesn't, they probably won't use the tactic in the future.
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
Third, adverts are turned off for non-logged in users. Try logging in.
Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and mission? I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian.
On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote:
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread.
I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? The WMF relies primarily on donations from individuals, and to a lesser extent on large grants from folks like Omidyar. So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will continue to grow. If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests. In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail. Our "economical autonomy" derives from our principles of openness and freedom.
- Brian
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and mission? I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian.
On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote:
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you
should
start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't
get
hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Correction: So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will *not*continue to grow.
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread.
I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? The WMF relies primarily on donations from individuals, and to a lesser extent on large grants from folks like Omidyar. So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will continue to grow. If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests. In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail. Our "economical autonomy" derives from our principles of openness and freedom.
- Brian
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and mission? I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian.
On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote:
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they
not
try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you
should
start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't
get
hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Brian J Mingus wrote:
I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread.
I care. You shouldn't be top-posting or bottom-posting. Use inline posting: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
Brian J Mingus (also) wrote:
Firstly, this is probably just an experiment to see if it draws more donations. If it doesn't, they probably won't use the tactic in the future.
The issue isn't whether it's a experiment or even whether it's successful. The issue is one of principles. Animated banner ads aren't acceptable.
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
This is a false dilemma. The money needed to keep Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects running and ad-free for the next year was raised _weeks_ ago. It's against Wikimedia's principles to use obnoxious or misleading ads to raise money in this manner.
Third, adverts are turned off for non-logged in users. Try logging in.
As the vast majority of page views are anonymous, this is largely a moot point. Yes, logging in will suppress the banners on an individual level. That doesn't make it acceptable to have bad banners for most of the readership.
MZMcBride
popups, lightboxes, talking jimbos: Fundraising 2011
Happy New Year everyone!
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:56 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Brian J Mingus wrote:
I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread.
I care. You shouldn't be top-posting or bottom-posting. Use inline posting: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
Brian J Mingus (also) wrote:
Firstly, this is probably just an experiment to see if it draws more donations. If it doesn't, they probably won't use the tactic in the
future.
The issue isn't whether it's a experiment or even whether it's successful. The issue is one of principles. Animated banner ads aren't acceptable.
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you
should
start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't
get
hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
This is a false dilemma. The money needed to keep Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects running and ad-free for the next year was raised _weeks_ ago. It's against Wikimedia's principles to use obnoxious or misleading ads to raise money in this manner.
Third, adverts are turned off for non-logged in users. Try logging in.
As the vast majority of page views are anonymous, this is largely a moot point. Yes, logging in will suppress the banners on an individual level. That doesn't make it acceptable to have bad banners for most of the readership.
MZMcBride
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hi!
I need not imply that the WMF depends on money.
Or rather, "certain parts of WMF depends on certain amounts of money".
It's kind of obvious, isn't it?
It is not obvious how much money is "urgent", more urgent than the need to read the article. It is not obvious how much money is sooooo urgent that it needs to distract me from reading the article by blinking. It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people from reading the article until they donate.
I want to build Wikipedia so that people can read it. I for one don't want to build Wikipedia so that it could be used as vehicle of WMF growth - I thought that was supposed to be opposite (I guess my priorities are different from ones declared by strategy project :).
If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations.
Which isn't entirely bad. In lots of places, if you don't have money, you become more efficient at what you do or do less. Having unlimited funding (which is brought by largest advertisement space on the internet) can spoil too early.
There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests.
They already do, don't they?
In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be.
Exactly, that was how the things were when we were actually growing - when we had to grow our environment to be able to sustain new users. Now pageviews don't really grow much (the percentage of reach/pageviews is quite flat), we don't have more edits, number of active users is flat.
Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail.
The major premise of the campaign is "keeping it free" - but it is much larger than previous campaign and involves lots of organization growth. This campaign target was big enough so fundraising team had to resort to annoying tactics - that also bred countless internet memes - I'm sure there will be Wikipedia article about them.
I don't care about the mess up of titles like "Wikipedia Director" or whatever. I care that we make the actual service to our users suck, and that ends up our priority, as other departments apparently have no say over what fundraising team does.
Domas
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
It's kind of obvious, isn't it?
It is not obvious how much money is "urgent", more urgent than the need to read the article. It is not obvious how much money is sooooo urgent that it needs to distract me from reading the article by blinking. It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people from reading the article until they donate.
I think we can equate 'urgent' to 'keeping the sites operational'. With that in mind we can look at the 2010-11 plan [1] to see how much money is budgeted for doing that:
$1.8 M (up from $1 M) is budgeted for hosting costs, ie keeping the servers operational and buying enough internets to feed them with.
$3.3 M (up from $0.96 M) is budgeted for capital expenses, most of which (though an unspecified proportion) is to fit out a new datacentre and get more bandwidth for the existing ones. We can count this as urgent too (making sure the sites remain operational with growth over the 12 months).
We don't know what proportion of the $9 M budgeted for salaries is for the tech staff. With projected hirings over 2010-11 (16 new tech staff for a total of 38), they will make up about 40% of staff (roughly the same as at present). Not all of these will strictly be necessary for keeping the sites operational though. Not all the new positions are specified, but the ones that are range from strongly connected to keeping the site operational (five new tech operations positions, a datacentre engineer), to moderately connected (a couple of new positions relating to MediaWiki development), to not connected at all (people to work on a database to "track relationships with all stakeholders including readers, editors, donors, other volunteers, etc").
Moreover, as much as we all love the current tech staff [2], not all of their positions are related to keeping the site operational; some are about expanding functionality.
But let's be generous and say that all the tech staff can be put in the 'urgent' pile, and that tech salaries will be $3.7 M (41.7% of the budgeted amount for salaries, assuming here that tech salaries are no higher or lower than other salaries). Let's also assume that the whole of capital expenditure will be on tech essential for keeping the sites operational into the future.
This puts a ceiling on 'urgent' costs at $8.8 M, or 43% of the budget of $20.4 M. [3]
-- [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foun... [2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Technology [3] The fundraiser hit $8.8 M on Dec 16. But, subtracting the budgeted $4 M of non-fundraiser revenue, the fundraiser needed to meet $4.8 M to cover 'urgent' expenses, a mark it hit on Nov 25.
On 1 January 2011 13:45, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
This puts a ceiling on 'urgent' costs at $8.8 M, or 43% of the budget of $20.4 M. [3]
This is a worthwhile analysis, but you have neglected the numerous expenses involved in supporting a large organisation. You can't have an organisation with an $8.8M budget without managers, fundraisers, HR, legal counsel, etc.. The WMF could trim its budget a lot without harming basic site function, but not as much as your method suggests.
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 1 January 2011 13:45, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
This puts a ceiling on 'urgent' costs at $8.8 M, or 43% of the budget of $20.4 M. [3]
This is a worthwhile analysis, but you have neglected the numerous expenses involved in supporting a large organisation. You can't have an organisation with an $8.8M budget without managers, fundraisers, HR, legal counsel, etc.. The WMF could trim its budget a lot without harming basic site function, but not as much as your method suggests.
Sure, I don't attempt to estimate overheads. But that's probably balanced out by the generous assumptions made, particularly the one that all tech staff are essential for site operation, when as many as half of them are mostly about building functionality (eg, all the people employed in connection with the usability project).
On 1 January 2011 10:40, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests.
They already do, don't they?
I understand that for the current fundraiser, it was in fact an explicit goal to seek smaller donations from more people - specifically to visibly maintain editorial independence for the projects from the gentle suggestions of any individual large donor.
Of course, if e.g. Microsoft or Google open their chequebooks and give the Foundation a large untied grant (and both have done so) then we are most pleased and will happily tell the world that they have done so and it was very good of them and we are most grateful. But the point is not to *have* to seek out large donors.
This actually goes against most accepted principles of fundraising, which follow a Pareto (80:20)-like rule: if your aim is as much money as possible, seek the large donors, who then recruit the next level of donors ("I gave $100k, you can give $50k") and so on.
However, the WMF is not like most charities, and just getting as many bucks as possible by whatever means is not in fact the aim. We actually have to think about getting the bucks in the *right* way, and $10 from *lots* of people gets us enough to do our stuff *and* turns those donors into our co-conspirators on the Mission.
- d.
2011/1/1 Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com:
It is not obvious how much money is "urgent", more urgent than the need to read the article. It is not obvious how much money is sooooo urgent that it needs to distract me from reading the article by blinking. It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people from reading the article until they donate.
Hi Domas,
happy new year to you and to everyone! :-)
Asking a reader to make a donation is by definition a distraction from what they came to do. The question has always been, and continues to be, how we want to balance this distraction away from the utility that Wikimedia projects provide (i.e. instant access to information), with the need to raise funds that will not only permit us to maintain, but increase that utility.
I don't see anything wrong at all with messages that signal increased urgency as the fundraiser draws to a close. Nor do I see a mildly animated banner in the last 48 hours of the year (and the fundraiser) which reminds people about tax-deductible donations and seeks to energize a final push for the remaining funds towards the goal, as a violation of the contract between us and our readers.
That being said, I don't want to dismiss or diminish concerns about where that balance should be. Indeed, the size and graphical visibility of the banners this year have certainly pushed my own pain points as to what I consider an acceptable balance. At the same time, I've had countless conversations in past years with people who didn't even notice that we were fundraising. To a certain extent, touching those pain points is necessary to even register with people who have both the ability and desire to support us.
The fundraising team has continually applied judgment regarding this balance.
- For the first time, banners were completely disabled for registered users later in the campaign, because there was simply no justification for a continued aggressive ask from volunteers, who very likely had already donated if they wanted to. This will likely become standard practice in future, at least after some initial period in which everyone sees the banners.
- In spite of the proven effectiveness of the Jimmy appeal, the team switched away from it for extended periods of time, for example to run appeals from individual Wikipedia editors, for no other reason than to reduce "message fatigue" and annoyance, even though these banners didn't perform as well. More graphic banners were also substituted with less visually strong ones during parts of the campaign for the same reason, and different variants were continually tested to identify "the least annoying message that works".
- We needed to balance our desire to not overuse certain messages with the goal to end the fundraiser as early as possible. As every year, we've upheld our commitment to stop running fundraising banners the moment we're confident that we've made our goal -- and we've done so more quickly than ever in recent history, as can be seen on http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics.
Needless to say, certain ideas were off the table from the beginning (including of course interstitials and the like).
To be sure, this year's campaign has certainly pushed the envelope to meet its ambitious goal. Prior to this year, we didn't really have a good sense exactly what the ceiling of the fundraiser would be, because we'd never pushed it as hard was we could before we reached our goal. This year's experience will help us to establish realistic targets for next year, which clearly can't represent a similarly ambitious increase.
And we'll have many long conversations to see which areas _other than_ more aggressive messaging will likely yield substantial increases in revenue at this point. For example, while we've offered a standard monthly payment mechanism this year, I haven't yet seen revenue projections from this, as well as possible scenarios for expansion. There are various matching gift models that we've never really tried to scale. And we'll want to understand the successes and failures of chapter-based fundraising better.
With all that said, I've seen organizations like public broadcasters go down a road of increasingly aggressive fundraising, to the detriment of the actual experience of the product. I think we would be wise to take steps to avoid that, also with an eye to the fact that management changes over time and principles that aren't stated are easily ignored. So I am in favor of drawing a line as to what we consider acceptable and unacceptable fundraising practices. Perhaps that's a conversation that we can have with the Board, as an extension of the first set of principles articulated here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_princip...
I also think for next year we can and should do more to actually track annoyance: How many people spend less time on site, or close the page they're visiting, because of a banner? How many people accidentally click on the banners without meaning to? Etc. The more hard data we have, the better we can optimize for a positive experience. There are other long-standing ideas, such as making it easier to permanently hide the banners at least after having made a donation, that we should continue to look into.
Now pageviews don't really grow much (the percentage of reach/pageviews is quite flat), we don't have more edits, number of active users is flat.
According to your own stats as processed by ErikZ, pageviews increased from 8.9B to 13.7B from March 2008 to November 2010. Perhaps not staggering relative growth as in the early years, but fairly dramatic in absolute terms when you consider how many millions of additional people served it represents. Reach among Internet users also continues to grow not just in the US and Europe, but also in key growth regions. For example, reach among Internet users in India has increased from about 26% to 33.5% over the last year, according to comScore.
So, we are serving more users than ever (more than 410M a month according to the latest comScore numbers, which if anything are likely to underestimate the real number). We have a greater responsibility in the world than ever. The reason to raise $16M is to meet that responsibility. To meet it, for example, by making sure that we have reliable, distributed backups of all key data; that we won't disappear from the net for extended periods of time if Tampa goes down; that we don't have to rely entirely on the goodwill of a talented database engineer from Lithuania to deal with MySQL woes.
But Wikimedia Foundation isn't (and has never been) purely a techno-organization, it's a global educational media organization and world-wide movement for free knowledge, which critically depends on technology to get its work done. WMF has to provide and improve that technology (and recent threads about WYSIWYG and structured data show the degree of interest that people have in WMF doing a lot more), but supporting growing communities like the ones in India, networking with global cultural and educational institutions, supporting Wikimedia chapter work, providing legal safeguards, etc., are just as much part of our mission. The 2010-11 budget represents an increase from 38% to 48% in technology spending, but it also represents significant investments in other programmatic work. And that's a good thing.
I'm incredibly proud, for example, that for the first time in Wikimedia's history, WMF has facilitated institutional relationships with leading universities in the US ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli... ) to improve article content as part of student assignments, with a very substantial amount of content already added, and the foundation for lasting relationships that will boost quality, credibility, and Wikipedia's continued use in the classroom. ( See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-12-27/Ambassa... ). And this is being funded with a grant, not the core operating budget. Yes, it's a US-centric program, but it's a start and a model, and to the extent that we'll invest in related activities out of core funds, we'll do so with an eye to internationalizing.
I'm proud of our network of chapter organizations for building more relationships with cultural institutions than ever before, as can be nicely seen in the timeline on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships. I was thrilled to see the report of the multi-university writing competition organized with WMF financial support by Wikimedia Indonesia, which greatly boosted editing activity on the Indonesian Wikipedia. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_ID/Free_Your_Knowledge_Project_2010/Report. Similarly, I'm fascinated by the many photo competitions organized by Wikimedia Czech Republic, including projects like photo-hunts for scientific and other specialized media http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pictures_of_the_Acquiring_scientific_and_specialized_pictures_grant. These are just a few examples of chapter work, of course.
And I'm pleased that we can support chapters and other volunteers with a growing network of outreach and training resources that can be used at conferences, booths, workshops, seminars, etc., ranging from "First steps" guides to a mini-syllabus and screencasts, video invitations to edit, etc., all cataloged at http://bookshelf.wikimedia.org/ and created using open source tools.
I'm able to hold in my hand perhaps the first-ever book of expert-reviewed Wikipedia articles, as described in http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/encyclopedia-of-life-curates-wikipedias-species-articles/. Scaling third party review of Wikimedia content could dramatically increase the utility of the projects.
On the technology front, in the last year we: - deployed the first design change across Wikimedia projects in a very, very long time, based on the first-ever systematic usability studies of the Wikipedia experience. The changes deployed don't go nearly far enough, but they are important foundations for future work. - activated the mobile gateway as default for suitable smartphones, now serving about 4% of total pageviews; - developed a completely re-vamped media uploading UI, which is currently in public testing on Commons; - began experimentation with OpenWebAnalytics and actively supported its development; - deployed a small scale test of reader feedback tools and began analyzing the results.
Again, that's just a selection, and it's leaving aside improvements to testing/QA, recent joined efforts to clear the code review backlog, etc.
All this represents growth in our ability to serve our mission; all this represents opportunity; and all of it was unlikely to ever happen with the Wikimedia of yesteryear that could barely keep the lights on. We're learning and improving as we go along, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that a well-funded free knowledge movement is good for the planet. Nobody is interested in growing this movement at the expense of the utility it provides. But grow it we must, and we will.
2010 has seen the Wikimedia movement truly achieve more than it ever has in its history, and that's in very significant part thanks to its ability to obtain public support. I'm incredibly grateful that hundreds of thousands of people believe in the Wikimedia mission. As David put it, they are becoming co-conspirators in our nefarious goal to bring free knowledge to every single person.
To a successful and prosperous 2011,
On 1 January 2011 23:50, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
I don't see anything wrong at all with messages that signal increased urgency as the fundraiser draws to a close.
I do. When the fundraiser ends is a choice you make, not something imposed upon you by external forces. Also, people can continue to donate after the main campaign finishes. There is no urgency at all.
I agree with the rest of your email, though. The WMF's increased budget is justified. That money is going on worthwhile things. That doesn't, however, mean that we should raise that money by whatever means necessary.
On 2 January 2011 00:09, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with the rest of your email, though. The WMF's increased budget is justified. That money is going on worthwhile things. That doesn't, however, mean that we should raise that money by whatever means necessary.
We are not within a thousand miles of "by whatever means necessary", even by the standards of other charities. As such, your statement approaches hyperbole when compared to the real world.
- d.
On 2 January 2011 00:15, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 2 January 2011 00:09, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with the rest of your email, though. The WMF's increased budget is justified. That money is going on worthwhile things. That doesn't, however, mean that we should raise that money by whatever means necessary.
We are not within a thousand miles of "by whatever means necessary", even by the standards of other charities. As such, your statement approaches hyperbole when compared to the real world.
While we may not have reached such levels this year, the WMF has made it clear that they consider making the money the main thing.
Philippe, on the fundraising mailing list on 13 December (during the discussion regarding the "Wikipedia Executive Director" banners) said: "So yeah, we're doing everything we can to maximize the income."
That is the completely wrong attitude. If we cannot reach our target with an honest campaign, we should accept that we cannot reach our target and make do with less money. We should not lie to and mislead our donors.
2011/1/1 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
That is the completely wrong attitude. If we cannot reach our target with an honest campaign, we should accept that we cannot reach our target and make do with less money. We should not lie to and mislead our donors.
I fully understand the arguments not to use shorthand like "Wikipedia Executive Director". It clearly is counter to our desire to be seen as a movement with multiple supporting organizations, and for Wikipedia to be understood as a largely self-governing community, and it's of course Wikipedia-centric. But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
The different degrees of meaning that we're trying to convey here are barely noticeable to anyone but Wikimedians themselves, and as such, the choice of different messaging is just that -- an important choice about how we want to self-present and ultimately the kind of understanding of our movement that we want to convey. Every complex organization/movement has these kinds of conversations, and it helps to have them without implicitly or explicitly accusing people of dishonesty or recklessness. Our self-inflicted branding nightmare (Wikipedia/Wikimedia/MediaWiki etc.) is one that we'll have to continue to confront.
Similarly, there are few fundraising techniques that are more conventional than developing a sense of urgency throughout a campaign (google fundraising and urgency). The whole point of a fundraising campaign is, yes, to _urge_ as many people as possible to give within the timeframe during which all messaging and resources are aligned to receive donations. So the narrative of every reasonably well-executed fundraising campaign is to build excitement towards a goal, to emphasize the importance of making a gift today, etc.
Yes, one can do so to an extent that's misleading and problematic. But, I haven't seen any instance of misleading messaging in our campaign. Instead in our most "urgent" appeal there were sentences like: "Not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine, because each year just enough people support Wikipedia with a small donation." This is an example of careful and deliberate balance in messaging.
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
Hang on:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's possible we could attract more people with the institution of Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
So wait, why was the choice made?
2011/1/1 Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
Hang on:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's possible we could attract more people with the institution of Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
See the immediately previous sentence in Philippe's email: "Yes, it'll come as a shock to all of you <tongue-in-cheek> but there are people who don't know that Wikimedia is anything more than a mis-spelling of Wikipedia. </tongue-in-cheek>." He's talking about the exact same issue.
Perhaps you should work on establishing the Wikimedia brand...
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/1/1 Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org
wrote:
But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
Hang on:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to
Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's possible we could attract more people with the institution of Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
See the immediately previous sentence in Philippe's email: "Yes, it'll come as a shock to all of you <tongue-in-cheek> but there are people who don't know that Wikimedia is anything more than a mis-spelling of Wikipedia. </tongue-in-cheek>." He's talking about the exact same issue.
-- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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I liked the idea of clearly indicating what the current amount of funds would go for and what the next major funding milestones are. (Sorry, whoever it was who posted this initially as an alternative to things becoming "urgent" - I'd cite your post but I didn't find it upon looking again!)
The thing is, that might not work to bring in the bucks the same way "urgent" does.
Maybe in light of the comment about Pareto: there are going to be a few people who can contribute a lot (including non-monetary contributions) and many who can contribute a little (again, including both monetary and non-monetary contributions).
Those who want to contribute "a lot" in terms of hands-on involvement, volunteer hours, and so forth, would probably be very well served by clear links to the "thermometer" or a clear indication of project and fundraising milestones. Those who just want to contribute X amount of money because it makes them feel good have no need for that stuff.
Obviously we're talking about *fund*raising here, but it's still a good time to look for ways to increase non-monetary contributions, possibly including connecting with those users who would prefer a "co-op" model to a "charity" model.
On 1/2/11, Mono mium monomium@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps you should work on establishing the Wikimedia brand...
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/1/1 Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org
wrote:
But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
Hang on:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to
Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's possible we could attract more people with the institution of Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
See the immediately previous sentence in Philippe's email: "Yes, it'll come as a shock to all of you <tongue-in-cheek> but there are people who don't know that Wikimedia is anything more than a mis-spelling of Wikipedia. </tongue-in-cheek>." He's talking about the exact same issue.
-- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 9:14 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/1/1 Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
Hang on:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's possible we could attract more people with the institution of Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
See the immediately previous sentence in Philippe's email: "Yes, it'll come as a shock to all of you <tongue-in-cheek> but there are people who don't know that Wikimedia is anything more than a mis-spelling of Wikipedia. </tongue-in-cheek>." He's talking about the exact same issue.
How is someone not knowing the difference between Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and someone being willing to donate to one and not the other, the exact same issue? They're closer to the exact opposite issue.
Hello,
There is still a huge difference between "telling a lie" and "being inaccurate", and I don't see something misleading. It is true that the Wikipedia/Wikimedia is confusing to many people. It never happened to me that people, to whom I explained about, had any problem with using Wikipedia as the umbrella word for the whole movement.
Ziko van Dijk
2011/1/2 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2011/1/1 Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
Hang on:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's possible we could attract more people with the institution of Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
See the immediately previous sentence in Philippe's email: "Yes, it'll come as a shock to all of you <tongue-in-cheek> but there are people who don't know that Wikimedia is anything more than a mis-spelling of Wikipedia. </tongue-in-cheek>." He's talking about the exact same issue.
-- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 2 January 2011 01:56, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/1/1 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
That is the completely wrong attitude. If we cannot reach our target with an honest campaign, we should accept that we cannot reach our target and make do with less money. We should not lie to and mislead our donors.
I fully understand the arguments not to use shorthand like "Wikipedia Executive Director". It clearly is counter to our desire to be seen as a movement with multiple supporting organizations, and for Wikipedia to be understood as a largely self-governing community, and it's of course Wikipedia-centric. But to suggest that the choice of such shorthand is tantamount to "lying to and misleading our donors" is, indeed, irresponsible hyperbole. It's clear that the choice was, in fact, made to _reduce_ potential confusion of donors about who/what they're being asked to support.
The Wikipedia/Wikimedia thing was harmful to our efforts to get people to understand how the movement works, but I don't think it got people to donate under false pretences. My problem is primarily with the false claims of urgency.
Similarly, there are few fundraising techniques that are more conventional than developing a sense of urgency throughout a campaign (google fundraising and urgency). The whole point of a fundraising campaign is, yes, to _urge_ as many people as possible to give within the timeframe during which all messaging and resources are aligned to receive donations. So the narrative of every reasonably well-executed fundraising campaign is to build excitement towards a goal, to emphasize the importance of making a gift today, etc.
Yes, one can do so to an extent that's misleading and problematic. But, I haven't seen any instance of misleading messaging in our campaign. Instead in our most "urgent" appeal there were sentences like: "Not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine, because each year just enough people support Wikipedia with a small donation." This is an example of careful and deliberate balance in messaging.
I'm familiar with the concept of trying to get people to donate immediately because they probably won't get around to donating at all otherwise. That isn't an excuse for lying, though. All the messages with the word "urgent" in were misleading. You received plenty of money to keep the sites up and running within the first few weeks of the fundraiser. There never was any urgency. You were telling people that if they didn't donate Wikipedia would go offline and that wasn't true. That is a lie.
2011/1/2 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I'm familiar with the concept of trying to get people to donate immediately because they probably won't get around to donating at all otherwise. That isn't an excuse for lying, though. All the messages with the word "urgent" in were misleading. You received plenty of money to keep the sites up and running within the first few weeks of the fundraiser. There never was any urgency. You were telling people that if they didn't donate Wikipedia would go offline and that wasn't true. That is a lie.
We'll have to agree to disagree that having a banner that includes the text "urgent" is misleading.
Where were we "telling people that if they didn't donate Wikipedia would go offline"? Can you cite the specific language (banner or landing page) that you're objecting to? Or is this just you again objecting to the word "urgent"?
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But Wikimedia Foundation isn't (and has never been) purely a techno-organization, it's a global educational media organization and world-wide movement for free knowledge, which critically depends on technology to get its work done.
And noone would be a subscriber to this list if they did not care about free knowledge. It's just that seeking donations to fund the growth of the movement, and the pursuit of its goals, ought to be carried out by way of messaging that refers to that growth and those goals, not messaging that, for example, implies that the projects will go offline or be forced to resort to advertising if the full $16 M target were not met.
We have a greater responsibility in the world than ever. The reason to raise $16M is to meet that responsibility. To meet it, for example, by making sure that we have reliable, distributed backups of all key data; that we won't disappear from the net for extended periods of time if Tampa goes down; that we don't have to rely entirely on the goodwill of a talented database engineer from Lithuania to deal with MySQL woes.
Yes, but the new datacentre and the new tech hires represent less than 40% of the new spending planned in 2010-11. This is assuming that the datacentre and bandwidth upgrades represent the whole increase in capital expenditure in 2010-11 ($2.3 M), and that as new tech staff represent 36% of planned hires they will represent an equivalent proportion of the increased expenditure on salaries ($2.1 M). [1]
They are one of the reasons, but not the only one, to raise $16 M. They are the reason to raise perhaps a third of that target.
-- [1] Obviously this will not be a correct figure, as I'm sure the tech staff do not get paid the same on average as all the other staff. Moreover the order in which the new staff are hired throughout the year will have some impact on this total. However, not all of the current/new tech hires are/will be working on anything mission critical. This suffices as a ballpark figure.
Erik,
happy new year to you and to everyone! :-)
Thanks for greetings, and even more thanks for such an effort in trying to address the concerns.
Asking a reader to make a donation is by definition a distraction from what they came to do.
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.
The question has always been, and continues to be, how we want to balance this distraction away from the utility that
We have been balancing it forever. It worked, right? We did not need blinking banners for years, and now that organization is under way less stress than ever before it starts pushing boundaries way beyond what we were doing before. Thats not cool.
I don't see anything wrong at all with messages that signal increased urgency as the fundraiser draws to a close.
Well, then you did not open the site with banners that were there.
Nor do I see a mildly animated banner in the last 48 hours of the year (and the fundraiser) which reminds people about tax-deductible donations and seeks to energize a final push for the remaining funds towards the goal, as a violation of the contract between us and our readers.
Well, of course, it wasn't dancing monkeys, so adblock wasn't used or browser window was not closed immediately. It was way more subversive, designed to distract you from what you're doing on the site again and again. I don't know how your mind works, but I prefer to concentrate.
Now, the fact that you do not see it as problematic with regards to our service means that you are failing to think in terms of service and think only in terms of a revenue source, which is very sad.
Indeed, the size and graphical visibility of the banners this year have certainly pushed my own pain points as to what I consider an acceptable balance.
That is a bit different from what you said above.
At the same time, I've had countless conversations in past years with people who didn't even notice that we were fundraising.
Those people need dancing monkeys, I guess. And full screen ads. Go ahead.
To a certain extent, touching those pain points is necessary to even register with people who have both the ability and desire to support us.
We can take down the site to extort more money, take this as another fundraising suggestion. Then people will notice, heck, we may even get newspaper coverage.
The fundraising team has continually applied judgment regarding this balance.
Their judgment was definitely lacking experience in using websites.
To be sure, this year's campaign has certainly pushed the envelope to meet its ambitious goal.
Try using a message "we have ambitious goals and need your money for them" as a message, you can measure its effectiveness.
Prior to this year, we didn't really have a good sense exactly what the ceiling of the fundraiser would be, because we'd never pushed it as hard was we could before we reached our goal.
Fundraising team definitely didn't run out of all options. I'm sure it is possible to raise more.
With all that said, I've seen organizations like public broadcasters go down a road of increasingly aggressive fundraising, to the detriment of the actual experience of the product.
There is a reason we're doing this on the internet and not in traditional medias. It is much more efficient to do comprehensive encyclopedias on internet than on radio or TV or print.
There's a reason you're not buying out TV time to teach how to edit Wikipedia. You shouldn't judge anything Wikipedia does by the standards of public broadcasters, nor you should be applying their practice too much (oh wait).
We're different generation, so let's have our own quality benchmarks.
So I am in favor of drawing a line as to what we consider acceptable and unacceptable fundraising practices. Perhaps that's a conversation that we can have with the Board, as an extension of the first set of principles articulated here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_princip...
Though extending those principles would work nice, it is shame that "how to run a website" needs micromanagement from board level.
According to your own stats as processed by ErikZ, pageviews increased from 8.9B to 13.7B from March 2008 to November 2010. Perhaps not staggering relative growth as in the early years, but fairly dramatic in absolute terms when you consider how many millions of additional people served it represents.
Thats +50% over two and half years. As I told, the relative share on the internet didn't change much . As for dramatic increase of people served - our anons get served by cheap cache layer, our editors (and counts didn't grow much) are much more expensive to maintain :)
So, we are serving more users than ever
Yup, +50% over two and half years, now check how much more fundraising we're doing :)
We have a greater responsibility in the world than ever.
I agree - by nuking out other reference sources out of existence, we're holding reference material ransom :-)
The reason to raise $16M is to meet that responsibility. To meet it, for example, by making sure that we have reliable, distributed backups of all key data;
That was part of 2008 plan. And 2009. And 2010. :-)
that we won't disappear from the net for extended periods of time if Tampa goes down;
This may be useful, except that Tampa didn't go down too much so far.
that we don't have to rely entirely on the goodwill of a talented database engineer from Lithuania to deal with MySQL woes.
Unfortunately, you end up having to rely on more than just databases, as all the staff is working on fundraiser. ;-)
But Wikimedia Foundation isn't (and has never been) purely a techno-organization, it's a global educational media organization and world-wide movement for free knowledge, which critically depends on technology to get its work done.
Hehe, depends on perspective, being part of larger more influential organization is way more fun of course. Donors may see it otherwise, as they are supposed to help with urgent issues.
WMF has to provide and improve that technology (and recent threads about WYSIWYG and structured data show the degree of interest that people have in WMF doing a lot more)
Of course it has, yet....
The 2010-11 budget represents an increase from 38% to 48% in technology spending, but it also represents significant investments in other programmatic work. And that's a good thing.
Not all technology spending goes into supporting our sites, quite a lot of it goes to support organization itself.
Yes, it's a US-centric program, but it's a start and a model, and to the extent that we'll invest in related activities out of core funds, we'll do so with an eye to internationalizing.
I'm waiting for wide scope results as that is one of things why this may end up useful :)
On the technology front, in the last year we:
- deployed the first design change across Wikimedia projects in a
very, very long time, based on the first-ever systematic usability studies of the Wikipedia experience. The changes deployed don't go nearly far enough, but they are important foundations for future work.
Well, considering what Wikipedia achieved on one volunteer's design (Gabriel Wicke is god :), I can't wait for all the usability initiative things to make things sooo much better - I saw the presentation about collapsed templates and TOC and ... (btw, I was still searching for edit button on the left side today ;-)
- activated the mobile gateway as default for suitable smartphones,
now serving about 4% of total pageviews;
Yet it will be rewritten in 2011, out of fundraised money, I hear.
- developed a completely re-vamped media uploading UI, which is
currently in public testing on Commons;
Yet we're running on storage design back from 2003 or so, and we start doing headless chicken runs once in a while once image serving stops. :) OK, there's a project to fix that, I can't deny. Since 2003. :-) I can sure take lots of blame for that too, hehe.
- began experimentation with OpenWebAnalytics and actively supported
its development;
Well, thats organization-internal thing, mostly.
Do note, we have full pageview counting running on half a CPU core somewhere, yet OWA which doesn't do much is getting a full-blown database cluster to do something nobody knows what it will be able to do. I saw that some of last foundation data management efforts were literally shoving loads of data into textfiles and then expecting that database software will somehow be efficient on top of that, oh, that also blocked fundraiser, which caused another headless chicken run.
Again, that's just a selection, and it's leaving aside improvements to testing/QA, recent joined efforts to clear the code review backlog, etc.
Yep, as we push code live once a year, the backlog must be big :-)
All this represents growth in our ability to serve our mission; all this represents opportunity; and all of it was unlikely to ever happen with the Wikimedia of yesteryear that could barely keep the lights on.
Wikimedia/Wikipedia of yesteryear got into top10 websites doing reasonable job at being efficient and avoiding annoyances to raise funds (disregard all the jokes about downtime messages being profitable ;-)
We're learning and improving as we go along, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that a well-funded free knowledge movement is good for the planet. Nobody is interested in growing this movement at the expense of the utility it provides. But grow it we must, and we will.
There's lots of balance and trade-offs involved. I'm here to run a website that empowers lots of people. I think that we have quite some responsibilities in doing that correctly too, not just using our websites as cashcows for whatever ambitions we may have.
2010 has seen the Wikimedia movement truly achieve more than it ever has in its history
[citation needed]. There was no 'tectonic shift' in 2010 - Wikipedia transformed from idealistic project to major public commodity years before.
I'm incredibly grateful that hundreds of thousands of people believe in the Wikimedia mission. As David put it, they are becoming co-conspirators in our nefarious goal to bring free knowledge to every single person.
Hundreds of thousands of people want to "keep the knowledge free". They have no idea what it means in our lingo.
To a successful and prosperous 2011,
To productive and efficient 2011! :-)
Domas
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.
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
I don't think the dumps are a good example, because after all it's not the first time it has happened with the dumps (don't quote me on that exactly), But I know for sure it has for sure happened to the MediaWiki release tarballs, I can't find the posts in the archive but i vaguely remember discussion occurred on how it could be prevented and I do believe it was mentioned that at least just the current/latest version of the dumps were going to stored on another storage array.
No one thought about outreaching to somewhere like Amazon to have our dumps included in the services (AWS for example for the Amazon)? Because I know a AWS instance[1] was started but has been updated since 2009 since we don't output it in a format that they can use[2]
[1]. http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/2506 [2]. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=181620%F0%AC%95%B4
I'd like to precise because of my bad english that I don't how to handle "polite" questioning without looking condescending or angry. I am uttering my words with the most profound respect to Erik even if I dissent about some topics with him.
Erik wrote:
I don't think any of the fundraising banners that ran made it substantially harder to access the information that people were coming
Erik, why would people be complaining specifically about them if it's not about their disturbance?
Of course you're entitled to have your personal opinion about the banners' effects on YOURSELF (though I think you mentioned your 'pain points increasing too but not that much' earlier, I don't remember the exact wording). Of course you are. However speaking in vague and general terms right after testimonials and complaints could look like denial of OTHERS' feelings. Those reports could be genuine and even right. The facts could be that the 'banners' (aren't they self-published ads really?) ARE annoying (even worrying for some) and that the discussion should be allowed instead of denied.
My 2p.
Hi,
Happy new year everyone :)
I'm not gonna answer all the points raised in this threads as I don't have all the elements (I didn't enjoy the animated banner for example).
But I'd like to comment two points : I/ The urgency to raise at the end of the fundraising. While I do agree it could be misleading to say "We need your money now" as we've already covered the operating costs, you have to keep in mind two facts : 1) the week before the end of the year is the week in the year people to give the more money due to tax-deductions. It is normal (for me at least) to remind them that this is the last days they could give. Most of the NGO I give to sent me an email late December. It is urgent, for me, to give otherwise I won't benefit of the tax deductions. 2) Not only Wikimedia Foundation is raising money. All the chapters are. We can debate whether chapters do support our missions or not, but the fact is, in the current state of the movement, they do. And they too have budget to reach and programs to do. We must keep in mind that our movement is much bigger and developed than he used to be. And I do agree with Erik on that, 2010 is key year for the movement as a whole. Chapters are now the sources of many partnerships and events that push the movement, and its the mission, forward. I won't make a list but you just have to look at the different partnerships, mostly in Europe, about freeing and digitizing content. And as they're growing and getting professionalized, they're doing more and more useful (imo) things. So, from my point of view, yes 2010 was a key year for the movement.
II/ The distinction between Wikimedia and Wikipedia There are means of fundraising that are making sense to me (the urgent thing) but there are also some that doesn't make sens and are, in fact, undermining the work of dozens persons for month. In France, as everywhere else I'm sure, we've been fighting with the journalists so they would understand what Wikimedia Foundation is. It costs us a lot of time and money. For now 3 years we've been actively correcting most of the journalists making that very mistake. And it's paying off. Few days ago, I saw articles published saying "Wikimedia Foundation raised X millions $" on french news website, and during the fundraising many journalists explained that Wikipedia was raising money through Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation supporting Wikipedia. Yes there was a press release, but few month ago even with a press release, journalists were making the mistake... they don't anymore. They're still way to improve the awareness of what Wikimedia is, what our movement is doing etc. But I do agree that saying "Wikipedia ED" instead of "Wikimedia ED" is, on the long run, counter productive. Yes we might lose some donations in doing so, but we mislead readers and journalists. How can we justify to "harass" them to correct the Wikipedia/Wikimedia mistake when we do the very same thing during our fundraising. The only way we're changing this is in being stubborn (and I'm french so I know of stubbornness) and in keeping on correcting them. This is the only we can have the larger audience to understand the difference between Wikipedia and Wikimedia.
I do understand why the fundraising team did so, but imo, this is not the way to go. It's easiest, more effective for this very fundraising, but we're not helping ourselves by doing so.
I'd like to say few more words regarding this fundraising. It clearly is the most efficient we ever had. It also is the first one, since professionalization of the fundraising, volunteers were actually part of it and could get involved (there's way to improve the involvement of volunteers, but it's the way to go). It's also the first one with a strong will to have a rational / professional approach (though, again, there's way for improvement (A/B testing for one)).
So, to balance this thread, I do think we, globally, are on the right path.
There was mistakes made. No questions there. But hey we, wikimedians, should understand more than an anyone that it's through little steps and mistakes that we can improve fundraising. So I hope when the fundraising team will wrap-up they'll succeed in being critical with themselves (and that's not easy). That they'll read all of those, and the many to come, emails and take the best of it so next year they'll fix those mistakes... and make new ones :)
All the best
Christophe
Banners have been turned off for logged-in users on en.wp (and maybe other projects?) for quite some time now, since well before Christmas holiday break for most people.
-Dan On Dec 31, 2010, at 2:19 PM, Brian J Mingus wrote:
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Mono mium monomium@gmail.com wrote:
Awesome!
How about we add popups?
Seriously, if you're going to do this, just add AdSense...it's a heck of a lot prettier.
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:10 AM, K. Peachey <p858snake@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists@gmail.com> > wrote: >> now that we have blinking banners, >> Domas > Oh! Oh! can we have marquees as well... and those flashy "under > construction" gifs?? > -PeacheyFirstly, this is probably just an experiment to see if it draws more donations. If it doesn't, they probably won't use the tactic in the future.
Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
Third, adverts are turned off for non-logged in users. Try logging in. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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