Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:

I think it was not a mistake that every project got the fundraising notice.

It was a mistake, at least in the sense that I asked for the notice to be put up, and _thought_ that I communicated the intention that it be put up in English only. Whether it went up elsewhere because my intention was not sufficiently clear, or because the person who actually put it up made a mistake, I don't know.

But it only made sense because we are in a cycle of Slashdot stories, and Slashdot is an English website.

I was on an IRC channel when there was a discussion of some project being upset, and therefore blanking the message or not translating it. One person asked if the messages could be turned off for some projects. A few developers expressed that those projects should come up with alternative fundraising plans that cover their portion of expected funding need.

I do not know if this was a joke or a serious proposal, but I do not support this in any way shape or form. And if I don't support, more precisely, if the board doesn't support it (and I think I can comfortably say that none of us would), it isn't going to get anywhere at all.

Nothing was turned off. There followed a discussion of putting different traffic priorities to different projects. (But I am not sure if they were really serious about this.)

I don't know the nature of that discussion, so I can't comment. I would say that *if anything*, I would support that we always tend to "look out for the little guy" first, that is to say, to do whatever we need to do to make sure that small and growing wikimedia communities do not become 'ghettos' without proper support.

So after all, we are not so disappointing, I found.

Yes. Everyone, especially everyone who is really active, can be safely assumed to be acting from maximum goodwill. WikiLove and all that. :-)

Please always communicate to everyone in every language that I view Wikimedia as a _global_ movement, and that I am very much opposed to English-centric decisionmaking.

As a matter of practicality, it is not possible to conduct high-level policy discussions in any other language than English. And this is not just because of the board being English, but rather because for reasons that have nothing to do with any of us, English is the most widely spoken intermediate language in our environment.

If a German, a Japanese, an Italian, and a French person all meet to speak, and they wish to successfully communicate, it will be in English in most cases. This is not the fault of anyone at Wikipedia, and it is not an excuse for being English-centric in any way.

--Jimbo

On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 06:37, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:

Just some observations and remarks on this issue.

I think it was not a mistake that every project got the fundraising notice.

I was on an IRC channel when there was a discussion of some project being upset, and therefore blanking the message or not translating it. One person asked if the messages could be turned off for some projects. A few developers expressed that those projects should come up with alternative fundraising plans that cover their portion of expected funding need. Nothing was turned off. There followed a discussion of putting different traffic priorities to different projects. (But I am not sure if they were really serious about this.)

The idea about different traffic priorities was mine; the quotes are:

<jeronim`> 1. use delay pools in squid to lower service priority for wikis which reject money-asking messsages

and later,

<jeronim`> could have a community-decided choice between no ads, opt-in, or opt-out? <jeronim`> and quality of service somehow determined based on ad revenue?

This was *just brainstorming*. The idea was to increase choice by allowing each wiki to make its own decision about the tradeoff of aesthetics (advertising/donation requests or the lack of them) against speed (coming from ad revenue/donations).

Maybe these are stupid ideas or maybe not, but I'd like to be able to brainstorm on IRC without having to worry about doing damage control on the mailing list as a result.

--Jerome/jeronim