[WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is pretty much traditional for the fundraiser to cause controversy,
>> in fact. I know how Oleg feels. These days I ignore the ads, since I
>> don't see why I should give money well as time: and they are obviously
>> aimed at Wikipedia's readers, who outnumber the people seriously
>> involved with the site by a factor of 10,000 or more by now. I don't see
>> the banner any more: I don't remember dismissing it.
>
> Yeah, they could have avoided the controversy entirely by not showing
> them to logged in users.
>
> I also subscribe to the "my tastes are not aligned with the PR
> company's tastes, but that's to be expected" line of thinking.
>
> I guess the vague, icky feeling I get (and maybe some others feel) is
> that we, the volunteer editing army do all the work creating the
> product. But campaigns like this sometimes nudge slightly towards
> creating the impression that the WMF is sort of co-opting that product
> and marketing it as their own. (I'm deliberately hedging my words a
> lot here: "impression", "feel" etc)
>
> Steve
>

It's not a strange icky feeling I get, it makes me feel like some
angsty teenager is shouting TEH WIKI 4EVA (fr33 stuff rulez!)