On Wed, 2 Jan 2013 2:54 PM, Leslie Carr <lcarr(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I certainly do, too. I'm happy to volunteer for no pay, so I doubt anyone can possibly question that. However, underpaying for labor in a high demand market is a huge risk to the timely success of Foundation projects. The "cons" comments on Glassdoor.com from both satisfied and unsatisfied Foundation employees explain several reasons why. Don't forget where the money is coming from. 89% of donors visit Wikipedia several times per week and 40% of them visit at least once a day,[1] but only a third have ever edited.[2] 88% of them have a college degree,[3] and more than three quarters work in skilled professions.[4] Their worldwide median income is about USD $75,000 and more than 5% make over $200,000 per year.[5] Does that sound like the kind of people who would want to risk losing talent because their donations were limited to a fundraising goal set based on the blatantly false assertion that we aren't able to raise enough money to pay market rate? Donors' primary concern for the future, far more than any other concerns across all ages, income and education levels and gender, is that volunteers will lose interest causing Wikipedia to become out of date.[6] Sadly, that is exactly the problem we are having.[7] Of all the strategic goals, the number of active editors is the only one not being met.[8] But the Education Program, the most promising in training editors inside the world's colleges and universities, doesn't even have the staff to make sure that their article talk page templates are correctly dated. Someone seriously asked me in private email whether that means they're simply slacking off. No, it does not. Those templates were corrected by staff if they were added with the wrong date back when the Education Program was much smaller, but its staffing levels has fallen far behind the numbers of articles or students participating in it. The Foundation has shown it has the political will to take action to protect the Legal and Office Actions staff from the considerable overhead that SOPA/PIPA would have caused had it become law. Does the Foundation have the will to protect volunteer editors from the deleterious effects of income inequality? Is there any other political action which would truly or more closely be in the interest of our volunteer editors, about a fifth of whom work in or near poverty to contribute to Foundation projects? Given how popular the SOPA/PIPA action was, do we have any reason to believe than editors and the public would not overwhelmingly support such an action in support of income equality? I intend to find out. Leslie, the most frequent cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is unanticipated medical expenses. If one of your family members faced such unanticipated expenses, and you realized you could save them from bankruptcy and perhaps even save their life by leaving the Foundation and taking a job at market rate, would that not tend to sway your idealism? Since any of your colleagues could face the same circumstances, is it therefore not irresponsible instead to fail to meet or exceed the local market rate for technical labor? By the way, less than 10% of the volunteer-contributed appeal messaging submissions from the 2010 fundraiser have ever been tested, and those that were form a lognormal distribution suggesting that we could be raising about 2.5 times as much as the best performing banner from December, if the appeal statement in its third sentence were replaced with the best performing result of multivariate testing of those alternate appeal statements. All of the foreign language testing from this and previous years shows that the best performance in English produces the best performance in other languages, usually by about the same margin. Therefore, performing a multivariate test to optimize the banners and then translating the top performing resulting messages would not place any more of a burden on translators than using A/B testing to derive a much more poorly performing local optimum and then translating that. Sincerely, James Salsman [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e… [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e… [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e… [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e… [5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e… [6] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010FR_Donor_survey_report… [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_English_Wikipedia_editors,_2001_to_Se… [8] http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors_target