[Foundation-l] Fundraising and site notice

[Peter van Londen]

Hallo,
@Michael Snow 1: garbage has no place on Wikipedia, nor on something like
Fanpedia. I agree turning garbage into gold is not possible. OK, but the
question is if all the fancruft is garbage?
Turning garbage into gold has been a fantasy since the alchemists.
There's a reason it's a fantasy.
@Michael Snow 2: I like your idea of using templates for disputed content
for advertisements. But it would bring advertisements in all projects.
a) the consequence of this idea is that Wikimedia projects *should* have
advertising, and that the advertising should be used specifically to improve
the content.
b) Anything that is tagged as being disputed, controversial, needing
cleanup, unsourced, original research, vanity, or a host of other problems -
using one of the many such templates on the English Wikipedia, for example -
automatically gets advertising space added along with the tag.

@Waerth 1: it is not a way to get rid of fancruft from the Wikipedia: the
idea is a way to make money!! Fancruft is popular and therefor a project
like Fanpedia would have a kick-start. I am OK with another solution: like a
add-driven wine-encyclopedia, or an animal encyclopedia (allthough I hate to
loose that in wikipedia), or any other idea. Is is not focused just on
fancruft. I do invite you to start adding content on Wikipedia again.
And I am getting tired of the relatively very small group on NL. wikipedia
who try whatever they can to get these articles deleted. They have been
trying this for years. This proposal from them is in my opinion to xxxxth
attempt to accomplish this.
@Waerth 2: You are the only one advocating to join all sister-projects into
Wikipedia. I have never heard of anyone backing up that idea. Besides I
agree that the communities on other projects are not that big as on
Wikipedia, but 1) Wikipedia has a head start and 2) not everything needs to
be as successful as Wikipedia
@Waerth 3: I don't, I was asking for a feasibility of this project, before I
start-up a discussion which brings as nowhere, because it is not possible to
do.
If you want the Dutch project to be a guinea-pig better first discuss it
amongst the
community, instead of assuming the nl: projects will blindly follow you on
this.
@GerardM 1: You want advertisements on all projects to generate a lot of
money. Some persons have stated on this list: they want no advertising and
even no sponsoring (when we visually thank them). This proposal is a
compromise. It is like Swiss politics: a proposal from the center does
sometimes not have a chance to be accepted, because the left don't want to
back up that idea and also the right don't want to back up that idea, but
because of totally different reasons: the result is stagnation until one of
the forces becomes so strong that they win, leaving a big part of the
community with a bad feeling. A compromise is aimed at a win-win situation
or at least a partly satisfied feeling. And yes I would compromise further
if needed, allthough I have no clue why the growth would be prevented by
working on this proposal, we also have a resources problem: you can only do
so much. I want to make clear I did not sabotage and in fact do advocate
matching donations.
My problem with the whole argumentation against "advertisements" and
the arguments
used by the people who sabotaged the fundraiser is that they do not, have
not come up with any believable alternatives. I have been asked is there no
compromise .. My answer to that is that I do not want advertisement per se,
I want enough funding for the Wikimedia Foundation in order to be able to
continue to grow. For a compromise there is a need to water down positions.
The question is therefore: are you willing to sacrifice our growth by
preventing the  corresponding need for funding
@GerardM2: Here is a fair argument, which might not be overcome.
There is another reason why the proposal will not work. In the current
Wikipedia projects we have some latitude when we have a picture that is
a copyvio and bring it as part of what people call "fair use". When we
explicitly have these fan sites to make money, there is no room to
wiggle any more.

I have tried to expand on the ideas living in the Dutch community, which
could generate cash and would compromise for the different fractions inside
the communities. The answers here are in fact not-backed-up theoretical
opinions; I would like to work with a pilot-project on a ''small'' language
to see if it would work and what we can expect from it. It is very easy to
find reasons why something will not work, it is the easiest way.

So, alas, forget about the idea behind Fanpedia, it seems this is not
backed-up by you all, and please do expand on the idea of Michael Snow: Adds
are introduced to work on improving the Wikipedia-content.

Kind regards,
Londenp


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