Hello all, I would appreciate it if you could copy & translate this message to your relevant communities; I'll also post it to a couple of the mailing lists. First: Does Wikimedia have a funding crisis, does it need to ask people for money? The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization, and the vast majority of its funding comes from fundraising and grants. It operates more than 300 servers which keep Wikipedia alive, the associated hosting and bandwidth, and the staff needed to support it. Its annual expenses for the current fiscal year amount to approximately $6 million. We have already raised $2 million of that, which leaves us with a gap of $4 million which we need to raise through donations small and large. If we fail to meet our budgeted revenue goals during and past this fundraiser, we will eventually have to lay off staff and reduce our capacity planning for servers and bandwidth, both of which will directly affect your experience of Wikipedia. If you feel, for example, that developers are often slow to respond to requests, well, imagine how much worse it will be if we have to lay off some of them. If you feel that editing is often slow, imagine how much worse it will be if we cannot pay for additional servers or needed software improvements. As you know, the world is in economic crisis. At this point in time, we do not know what the impact of this economic crisis will be on the Wikimedia Foundation. We need to meet our targets to continue to operate Wikipedia. I realize that having a banner on the site you read and/or edit every day is not convenient. We plan to create a smaller (plaintext) version of the banner for signed in users. But we do not plan to reduce the banner size of the standard banner, at least not until we have a better idea of what the online fundraiser revenue will be for this year. We are doing some systematic A/B testing of different banners with different messages, and as we learn more, we will iterate the banners further. We do need to raise the funds to operate Wikipedia, so that you can continue to use it, both as a reader and a contributor. Rather than invite antagonism, I want to invite your collaboration in refining and developing the banners. We are open to community suggestions here -- please feel free to post mock-ups on Meta Wiki at this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2008/design_drafts However, if we feel (or measure) that a banner will significantly reduce the number of donations received, we will not use it. So if your primary goal is to make the banner smaller or less "obtrusive", rather than making it more effective or at least retaining its current level of effectiveness, I don't think we'll come up with something that can replace the current banners. Please let's remember that the Wikimedia Foundation exists to support this project's continued existence, and the Wikimedia movement internationally. This means we need to create awareness for the fact that we need to raise money, just like any other charity. This fundraising drive will run until January 15. Until then, I ask for your patience and cooperation in making it work. Please feel free to contact me: erik(at)wikimedia(dot)org. Thanks, Erik Möller 22:10, 5 November 2008 (UTC) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate