I totally agree with Gerard. And what Gerard says is just a small example.
I think we are raising much less funds than what we need.
But this is only one half of the problem.
The other half is that we are spending much less than what we raise:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/d5/Jul-Dec%2710_Mid-year_...
Perhaps there is something I don't understand. It seems strange to me that having 24M$ of current assets we don't have any financial income but 0,5M$ bank fees.
Message: 2
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 13:56:42 +0100 From: Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: AANLkTim-fcUyLt4GNfxJW0nLE84=f59i8NjjB25bNt=6@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hoi, So far the balance has been seriously wrong. Because of the underinvestment many of our Wikipedias are not doing as well as they should. There are for instance technical solutions to give many of the Indian language Wikipedias the traffic back they lost.
As this is not considered as a problem/priority, as we do not have developers dealing with this we are seriously underachieving.
The notion that we are raising more funds then we need is therefore obviously flawed. Thanks, GerardM
On 7 March 2011 13:11, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 7 March 2011 11:44, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:50 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com
wrote:
On 6 March 2011 10:14, Pavel Richter pavel.richter@wikimedia.de
wrote:
But who says that the sole purpose of the WMF is to keep Wikimedia
wikis
running?
I don't think many people would say that's the sole purpose of the WMF, but I think most would agree that it is the primary purpose. The amount of other work the WMF does in addition to that should be balanced by the harm caused by the extra fundraising required.
I think this articulates the issue very well.
Except that what I've actually written is that the WMF must, under no circumstances, do any other work unless they do an equal amount of harm by fundraising for it. That's not exactly what I meant!
"Balanced by" in the last sentence should be "in balance with"!
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On 7 March 2011 18:19, Joan Goma jrgoma@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps there is something I don't understand. It seems strange to me that having 24M$ of current assets we don't have any financial income but 0,5M$ bank fees.
AIUI, it was long a goal for the foundation *not* to be living hand to mouth, but to start keeping an actual reserve to hand.
- d.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org