[Foundation-l] Ads and monobook

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:53 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Chad wrote:
> > Let's assume projects can opt-out, and this must be approved
> > by the Board (as they are ultimately responsible for fiscal
> > matters). For the sake of arguments, let's pretend enwiki came
> > to a fairly clear consensus that they wished to opt-out of WMF
> > ads. Wouldn't this basically kill the entire ads cash-cow right
> > there?
> >
> > Now, continuing this scenario, I can imagine the Board would
> > probably reject an opt-out from the largest project. This begs
> > the question: does the Foundation see all projects in an
> > equal light?
> >
> > -Chad
>
>
> That's an excellent question !
>
> I am tempted to return it back first.
>
> If all the languages were voting independently from one another, for
> opt-in or opt-out... how would you feel if en.wiki would vote for "no
> ads", whilst ja.wiki vote for "yes" ?
> Would you rather consider the global project, or would you be willing to
> accept diversity ? Should it be a global decision, or a local one ?
>
> I guess that a global decision would make the issue a "core principle"
> whilst a local decision would make the advertisement issue a "mild
> principle".
>

To date it would appear that the WMF has been very intolerant to community
variations or differentiation on funding matters.  Unless you are suggesting
that the WMF actually might allow individual projects to control their own
advertising initiatives, then I think this particular thread of the
conversation is pointless.

To raise a similar example, as far as I know individual projects have never
been asked whether or not they want to participate in Foundation fund
drives, or how they want them to be run.  When the last fund drive was
launched with that abominable scrolling marquee (which gave a jittery
appearance for most users and outright crashed some older browsers), enwiki
discussed unilaterally removing it and people were threatened with instant
desysopping on the basis that project admins aren't allowed to interfere
with Foundation initiatives.

Obviously the immediate fundraiser issues were resolved eventually, but the
impression some of us were left with was that the Foundation would simply
impose these funding initiatives from above (with little concern for
community input or feedback) and with no tolerance for community
interference.

There are reasonable arguments for why funding drives ought to be run from
above, but let's be clear, if you are actually suggesting that
projects might be given local control over advertising and funding
initiatives then that is very different from how things have been run
historically.

-Robert Rohde