[Foundation-l] Priorities

[Florence Devouard]

Anthony wrote:
> At the same time, though, the English language Wikipedia is by far the
> most successful project. 

Yes, but... it depends of how you measure success really. We use a very 
simple metrics, which is number of visitors. Or number of articles. But 
is it really how we should measure success in the future ?
What is really successful I think is the impact we have, and I think the 
impact a project has goes far beyond its "number of readers". Simply, 
other impacts are not so easy to measure.


  Of course it's going to dominate interviews
> and presentations and news and discussions.  These are things the
> foundation couldn't control even if it wanted to.  And surely the
> English language Wikipedia generates the most revenue.

Well, a statistician would probably consider that it would be hard to 
drive honest conclusions on this, given that there is a huge bias.

Examples
* the fundraising sitenotice is only on the english wikipedia. Not in 
any other languages, that does not help to get revenue through another 
language indeed or another project indeed...
* our fundraising is largely meant for an english-speaking audience, not 
for any other one. The press release is exclusively in english (so it 
will not be sent to any other media than english ones). The video of 
Jimmy is in english. The general strategy fits well with a process to be 
used in the USA, far less in other countries
* the tax deduction is only available in the USA. Not anywhere else.
* the central figure of our fundraising is Jimmy, an american person.

Now, imagine that we would do just the same, but all in chinese. We 
would display a fundraising link only on the chinese wikipedia. With 
chinese-based text press release, chinese caracters on the donation 
page, deductibility in HongKong, Taipei and Mainland China etc...
I expect most funds would actually be generated thanks to the chinese 
wikipedia :-)

   As a result,
> shouldn't it be entitled to spend an equivalent portion of that
> revenue?

Practically, this is exactly what happens. It uses a big portion of our 
servers and bandwidth. Press is basically only done in english 
countries, not in other countries. Business is in big part done with the 
USA. Most attempts related to content partnerships have been done with 
american organizations.

But entitled ? No.