[Foundation-l] Donation banner and strongly negative reactions

[David Moran]

As far as my own reactions go, I'm not terribly bothered.  Yes, the banner
is visually irritating (I don't think it minimizes enough when you hide it),
but that's kinda the point.  Annual pledge drives on public television
channels are irritating too, but that's the price of having PUBLIC
TELEVISION.  Wikipedia is not Google, and I think the banners are a helpful
reminder to people of that.

Also, on a personal level, I wouldn't mind a personal option to turn them
off, but I think turning them off project-wide is insane.  Wikipedia lives
on donations, therefore we must solicit donations.  Suggesting that
Wikipedia could or should survive on the donations of people who think of it
first, without prompting, is unrealistic in the extreme.  Wikipedia is a
charity; this is how charities behave.

Personally, I like having it there.  I mean to donate before the year's out,
but I'm broke now.  If that banner wasn't there I'd forget about it sooner
or later and then never donate.

David Moran
aka FMF


On 11/7/08, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>
> Gregory Maxwell writes:
>
> > Hm? Every previous one has had strongly negative reactions from some
> > contributors.
> >
> > (I do not know for sure if this is better or worse but, for example,
> > to me it appears appears far less significant at this point compared
> > to the reaction at the time of the virgin unite thank-you.)
> >
> > The general public is already banner-blind. I'm not aware of any
> > significant negative response from the general public to any of these
> > fundraisers.
>
> My take is the same as Greg's, but let me add a little more. First,
> it's always the case that there's a negative reaction to anything
> instantiated as a banner. That's a given, like the tides. Second, the
> thing to remember about the negative reactions you see is that there's
> no reason to believe that they are representative of *general*
> reaction, since they are statistically nonrandom (not least because
> the impulse to offer criticism is greater than the impulse to offer
> praise, and much greater than the impulse to offer the sentiment "I am
> not bothered by this").  Third, the evidence we have suggests that we
> are doing rather better on fundraising this year than last year.
>
> This doesn't mean criticism should be ignored (and, believe me, it
> isn't). But the sky isn't falling, and in fact things generally seem
> to be going well in comparison to last year.
>
>
> --Mike
>
>
>
>
>
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