[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[Sebastian Moleski]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 9:31 PM, church.of.emacs.ml <church.of.emacs.ml@
googlemail.com> wrote:

> Sure. I'd love to get opinions from more people (perhaps at Wikimania,
> too?)
> The (editing) community should to be comfortable with Wikimedia raising
> funds, and if it isn't, we need to find ways so that it will be
> (disabling banners for logged-in users is a low-hanging fruit, taking
> their wishes in the selection (not only creation) of banners into
> account might be another).
>

If I remember correctly, banners were disabled for logged-in users some time
into the fundraiser. It would be easy to do that again, maybe a little
earlier.

In terms of annoyance, I think we all need to be careful not to substitute
our own judgment for that of others. Just because you or I find banners
annoying, it's a far jump to argue that our readers in general also found
them annoying. In fact, from what I've seen in terms of complaints, there
have been few that didn't result from the Wikimedia project communities.


> It's hard to tell. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it should be
> smaller, but it is obvious that we need to think about stop growing at
> some point (and in my opinion sooner than later).
>

You allude to an interesting point here: growth. Why do you think growth
needs to stop, and why sooner than later?

I would venture that growth, or rather size, is defined by what the
Foundation wants to accomplish and what resources are needed for that. Would
it be inherently wrong if, for example, WMF were an organization with a
headcount of 10,000 and a budget of a billion dollars, if that's what it
takes to accomplish the mission, e.g. allow every human to freely share in
the sum of all knowledge?

Best regards,

Sebastian