geni writes:

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It is also a opportunity to further annoy our readers. IT's pretty clear they don't like it

and you know this because...?

Because I run daily searches of blogs for the term wikipedia. Because complaints have turned up all over the place on wikipedia. Because or editors who also have to read the thing have gone so far as to have a gadget to get rid of it. Because adblock which targets banner ads among other things has 10,850,228 dowloads.

Because people come to wikipedia to read articles rather than thankyou messages and taking up significant significant screen space with stuff readers don't want is not generally considered a way to maximize the level of like for your site.

No could dispute that some people dislike the donation-solicitation banner or that some people complain about it.

But it seems worth underscoring here that we can't categorically say that everyone -- or even a majority of users -- are troubled by it to any great degree. The people who are untroubled by it are the ones who don't bother (a) to complain about it on their blogs or (b) to engage with those who complain about it on Wikipedia.

This is not a dismissal of anyone's complaints about the manner of the solicitation of donations on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Quite possibly we could do things better, and we will certainly try to. But it's a classic instance of sampling error to assume that the complaints are necessarily representative of the community of Wikimedians or the communities served by the projects.

(Confession: In another life I was a student of statistics and polling.)

--Mike