[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I mostly objected to the suggestion that people outside of "Wikimedia 
> finance" are not welcome to voice opinions on what sorts of steps 
> Wikimedia should take to finance itself.  

For the record, I was not privy to the formation of this particular partnership
(probably due to me being badly behind on my email). 

My role as CFO is to inform the board about our current costs and projected
increases thereof. It was the projected increase part that you both obviously
had little idea about yet were at the same time criticizing an idea to help
mitigate that by assuming it something that it is not. *That* is what my
comment was about. 

Aside: The information gap about our finances *is* in no small part my fault -
the board and officers are trying to remedy our information flow issues (I
still have to wait long times for bank activity info, for example, and thus
can't really inform the board when we are in danger of going over budget for
any particular item). I'm going to help remedy this by having a more ground up
approach to next year's budgeting. 

I plan to present draft budgets for each quarter of next year to the board by
the end of this year. Much, much work needs to be done. Please, come to meta to
help. 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Finance_department 

> Certainly mav is 
> better-informed on certain details of the finances, but broad policy 
> decisions, such as whether we ought to provide paid links to "partners", 
> ought to be open to discussion amongst Wikipedians at large.  This is 
> how it was done in the past---the Amazon trial balloon was only floated 
> with the explicit assurance that it was a trial balloon.  

This is also a trial. It will also be just one of many links on the Wikipedia
tools page. 

> Feedback was 
> solicited, and it was eventually abandoned after a significant number of 
> Wikipedians objected to that method of raising money.  Perhaps a large 
> majority of Wikipedians will support the answers.com-tool method of 
> raising money (perhaps because answers.com is less evil than Amazon, or 
> perhaps because it's less visibly advertised than the ISBNs are, or some 
> other reason), but that should be up to Wikipedians to decide, not 
> presented as a /fait accompli/.

Nothing is being presented as that here.

-- mav


	
		
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