[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Delphine Ménard, 10/12/2010 08:51:
 > On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 1:16 AM, Zack Exley <zexley at wikimedia.org> wrote:
 >> OK, everyone -- I learned my lesson! Thanks for teaching it.
 >
 > They say you are not really part of the tech team until you have
 > broken the site. I guess you are not really part of the Wikimedia
 > community until you've got a whole thread on some Wikimedia mailing
 > list criticizing your actions... ;)
 >
 > So...welcome to the Wikimedia community Zack! ;-)

+1 :-)
Just two small points.

Zack Exley, 09/12/2010 18:24:
> [...] Jimmy and the editor
> banners all said "pedia". [...]

This is because the campaign is centred on Wikipedia only and 
specifically on Jimbo (who is famous thanks to Wikipedia).
Hopefully the contributors appeals will also say something about 
Wikimedia and other Wikimedia projects and provide some banners which 
won't look out of place on sister projects.

Andrew Garrett, 10/12/2010 00:32:
 > On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 10:19 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> 
wrote:
 >
 >> This is an important point to raise regarding cultural and legal
 >> differences in regards to advertising, however the banner in question
 >> is not appearing in Australia.
 >>
 >> The Australian chapter is managing the banners and appeal text that
 >> appear within Australia, and there is no way 'Wikipedia Executive
 >> Director' would have been approved by the WMAu committee.
 >>
 >
 > For the record, I don't think that this arrangement is working well.
 >
 > There are a lot of people working on the fundraiser, both Wikimedia staff
 > and hundreds of volunteers from the community. The Foundation has 
allocated
 > substantial staff and resources to running a campaign that is agile and
 > data-driven. In the United States, this has had a strong result -- US
 > editors stopped seeing the Jimmy banners (which people are getting 
tired of
 > despite their effectiveness) a week ago. Elsewhere in the world, 
bringing in
 > the new editor/Sue appeal banners has been held up by this sort of
 > bureaucracy.
 >
 > If we believe (as I do) that the central fundraising team is the best 
team
 > for the job, then we should give them the ability to roll out their best
 > work quickly, without going through the bureaucratic quagmire of 
requiring
 > chapter approval for each special region. The rest of the world is 
missing
 > out on the best that they can do.
 >

Although some details may be improved, I think that this isn't true at 
all. A week is not much, and it's normal to test banners and appeals in 
English and on en.wiki/USA before translating and creating banners for 
every wiki in every language for every country.
Chapters are putting a lot of people in the fundraising, as well (WM-DE, 
WM-FR, WM-NL, WM-SR and maybe WM-UK and more also some paid staff), and 
I don't see why you should put this in terms of conflicts between better 
and worse teams instead of productive collaboration (as I see it).
By the way, although there isn't any 2009 fundraising report, when the 
fundraising is closed we'll hopefully be able to compare results in 
various countries, and also 2010 vs. 2009 results for each country where 
we have 2009 data.

Nemo