[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[church.of.emacs.ml]

On 03/05/2011 09:38 PM, Sebastian Moleski wrote:
> 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'd be nice to have some data. Perhaps a survey or some way to measure
how many people are annoyed by which banner.
Perhaps I'm oversensitive since I normally use AdBlock and I'm not used
to big banners. I just think we need to find out, how Wikimedia's
readers and authors see this.

>     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?

Because the amount of money WMF can raise is limited.
We're already forced to use annoying and big banners in order to keep up
with WMF's expansion plans. How are we going to raise $20M? $30M? $100M?
Unless we come up with some brilliant new fundraising technique, it's
going to be very difficult to keep the balance between justified
fundraising interests, and the readers' interests not to be annoyed.

Perhaps "stopping growth" is to strong and I should say "slowing down
growth" instead.

> 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?

No, it would not be inherently wrong. It'd probably be great.
But one has to take into account the effects that the methods we use to
raise funds might have on our readers and the editing community.

-- Regards, Tobias



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