[Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Erik Moeller]

2011/1/3 Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com>:
> Thanks for greetings, and even more thanks for such an effort in trying to address the concerns.

Thanks for raising them. I'll pick and choose a bit in my responses or
this thread would expand fairly quickly into all different directions,
but let me know if you feel I'm ignoring a key point you're making.

As far as I understand your main concern, you view the fundraising
practices this year as so disruptive that they distract too much from
the main purpose of providing a service to readers. I don't agree with
your characterization here:

> Well, there's a single "maybe he will consider once" distraction and there's "let's not allow to read the text" distraction. They are different.

I don't think any of the fundraising banners that ran made it
substantially harder to access the information that people were coming
to look up, and indeed, around 97-99% of people who came to look at an
article did just that and nothing else. We unfortunately don't know if
some of them closed the page _because_ of the banners, which is
something I'd like to track in future. We do know that the delayed
banner display (due to e.g. the geo-lookup) caused some people to
accidentally click it, which is essentially a bug that needs to be
fixed.

As per my earlier note, there are quite a few things we can experiment
with to reduce annoyance after the first display of a banner to a
user. For example, a reader might get a banner appeal, which also has
a prominent "Remind me later" button which disables the banners for
some time. If/when they donate, they might get a big "Permanently hide
fundraising banners" option. And those preferences should ideally be
active across sites.

So, where I would agree with you is that, as generating revenue
receives more attention than it ever has before, mindfulness towards
the reader experience needs to be more systematically part of the
planning than it's ever been as well, so we don't carelessly slide
down a slippery slope of annoying, distracting and frustrating our
readers. I think the fundraising team deserves more credit for
thinking about these issues in 2010 than they're getting, but I also
consider it a personal responsibility to ensure this point remains
very high on the agenda in our postmortem and planning for the future.

> We have been balancing it forever.

Yes, and every single fundraiser in recent memory has had its fair
share of internal controversy and criticism, usually related both to
the prominence of the banners and the messaging employed. In 2007 Sue
even asked Brion to implement a <marquee> tag, which he reluctantly
did and which was later removed. ;-) And you may recall the issues
with the Virgin Unite logo in 2006. In 2009 we annoyed people
inefficiently for a while with banners bearing large slogans that
didn't work.

> It worked, right?

For some definition of "worked". Yes, WMF and the Wikimedia community
have managed to keep WMF sites up and running in the face of
staggering and stressful growth, for which you and others deserve much
credit. But as you well know, even on the most basic level of our
operations infrastructure, many vulnerabilities remain to this day.
The recent extended unavailability of database dumps is an example of
serious failure, but failures like this happen when an organization is
understaffed/underresourced and only able to focus on the immediate,
not the longer term. And whether you agree with this or not, WMF's
mission extends beyond operating the websites, and it's performed
arguably insufficiently poorly in other categories, such as keeping up
with a dramatically changing technology environment, and supporting
and growing the free knowledge movement world-wide.

Organizations need to think about worst-case scenarios, and work
towards avoiding them. On the operations front, worst-case scenarios
include serious attempts to destroy data, complete failure of our
primary data center, etc. On the technology front, they include being
displaced by a technologically disruptive (likely for-profit)
competitor. With projects like Knol and Freebase, we've already seen
well-funded technologically proprietary projects operating in related
spaces, and we'll see more of them in future (and we've seen
successful competitors aided by state censorship in China). On the
community front, they include stagnation and ultimately decline, which
diminishes the utility of our services and makes us more vulnerable to
scenarios of being displaced.

Yes, a long-term perspective on our growth needs to take into account
both what we've been able to accomplish with far less, and what the
cost to our readers is to add prominent pleas for support. But we also
need to have enough realism to understand that the position we're in
is arguably the result of a fortunate accident of history. This places
with us a great degree of responsibility to support Wikimedia projects
and the community of purpose behind them as effectively as possible,
so as to protect and spread the values and positive social impact they
represent. Barely keeping the lights on is not sufficient. To realize
this means to be seized with an urgency which is just as real and
stressful as the challenges of keeping up with  unimaginable early
growth.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate