[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?

Zack Exley zexley at wikimedia.org
Thu Dec 9 17:24:44 UTC 2010


All -

We're going to test Wikimedia against Wikipedia in the banner right now.
Sorry for not starting with Wikimedia and testing pedia after, but we're
trying to iterate as close to one variable at a time. Jimmy and the editor
banners all said "pedia".

The fact is that most of our donors -- and more of our potential donors --
don't know what Wikimedia Foundation is, or only have a dim notion of it. If
they're on Wikipedia and the banner is talking about something else, they
think it's an ad for a third party. That's bad!

We need to connect with millions and millions of readers. Only 1% click the
banners when we're doing well. Less than 1% of those clickers donate. So we
can't afford to write banners that don't make sense to people.

Let just hope that Media does as well as Pedia!

Zack



On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 4:38 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 9 December 2010 10:00, Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org> wrote:
> > ouch, this is painful. Like many chapters probably I have been trying
> > to explain to people the difference between Wikimedia and Wikipedia,
> > and that Wikipedia has no such thing as a board of editors or even a
> > board of directors, but that the Wikimedia Foundation has, etc - and
> > now we are running a page ourselves that says we /do/ have an
> > executive director? (giving the impression that there is actually
> > personnel to write the encyclopedia) I know that KISS is a good thing,
> > but we have always tried to make clear that wiki/p/edia is a volunteer
> > project, why are we loosing that now?
> >
> > I hope that it will be possible to make this small change from a p into
> an m.
>
> I agree. It is very unfortunate that we are now stuck with such
> similar names for such different things, but we do need to get it
> right. Sue is *not* the ED of Wikipedia. She's not even the ED of
> Wikimedia. She is the ED of the Wikimedia Foundation.
>
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