[Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Domas Mituzas]

Hi!

> I need not imply that the WMF depends on money.

Or rather, "certain parts of WMF depends on certain amounts of money". 

> It's kind of obvious, isn't it?

It is not obvious how much money is "urgent", more urgent than the need to read the article.
It is not obvious how much money is sooooo urgent that it needs to distract me from reading the article by blinking.
It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people from reading the article until they donate. 

I want to build Wikipedia so that people can read it.
I for one don't want to build Wikipedia so that it could be used as vehicle of WMF growth - I thought that was supposed to be opposite (I guess my priorities are different from ones declared by strategy project :). 

> If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations.

Which isn't entirely bad. In lots of places, if you don't have money, you become more efficient at what you do or do less. 
Having unlimited funding (which is brought by largest advertisement space on the internet) can spoil too early. 


> There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from
> extremely wealthy private interests.

They already do, don't they? 

> In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth.
> That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be.

Exactly, that was how the things were when we were actually growing - when we had to grow our environment to be able to sustain new users.
Now pageviews don't really grow much (the percentage of reach/pageviews is quite flat), we don't have more edits, number of active users is flat. 

> Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really
> don't understand your e-mail.

The major premise of the campaign is "keeping it free" - but it is much larger than previous campaign and involves lots of organization growth. 
This campaign target was big enough so fundraising team had to resort to annoying tactics - that also bred countless internet memes - I'm sure there will be Wikipedia article about them. 

I don't care about the mess up of titles like  "Wikipedia Director" or whatever. 
I care that we make the actual service to our users suck, and that ends up our priority, as other departments apparently have no say over what fundraising team does. 

Domas