[Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.

[Mark]

On 12/31/11 3:21 PM, phoebe ayers wrote:
> And, not rhetorically at all, the question of how much to raise is one
> of the important questions to face us strategically. We are incredibly
> lucky that we have the ability, through our tremendous readership, to
> raise a substantial amount of money. We could raise less, certainly,
> and we could probably raise more (and there are lots of evil tactics
> to raise more that we won't consider). But every annual planning cycle
> (it starts up essentially now and goes through the spring) the WMF
> staff and board has to consider exactly that question -- what should
> we fund, and is any given new idea worth it, given that it represents
> donor dollars and fundraiser time? When are we pushing the outer
> limits of what we can raise? I encourage everyone to think and talk
> about these questions -- it's not a solved problem, but a complicated
> and important one.
I do think this is the key issue, and one where I think there many of 
the stakeholders aren't really on the same page, even in terms of basic 
starting information. Informally canvassing some of my non-Wikipedian 
friends and colleagues, the vast majority were under the impression that 
the purpose of the fundraiser was to raise money to "keep the lights 
on", more or less: to pay for servers and bandwidth holding the 
*.wikipedia.org websites, along with some associated stuff like the 
Wikimedia Commons media repository, and a few programmers and sysadmins 
to maintain the servers and MediaWiki.

I'd say (nearly?) everyone was pretty surprised when I sort of hemmed 
and hawed and explained that yes, that's the use of some of the money, 
but the budget is much larger than just that, and the main purpose of 
the fundraiser is to raise money for more ambitious projects, like new 
initiatives, grants to researchers, funding for travel and events, 
grants to Wikimedia chapters, etc. Some were pretty annoyed, feeling it 
was a bit of a bait-and-switch: the advertising gave them the impression 
that their donation was being used to keep wikipedia.org on the air and 
maintain the servers/software, and they didn't even realize the 
Wikimedia Foundation did or planned to do any of the other things with 
their money.

Of course, I'm not the best advocate in such situations, because I'm a 
bit wary of the direction things are going myself, so tend to give a 
sort of sheepish shrug in reply, and an explanation that a substantial 
portion of the money (though perhaps no longer the majority) *does* go 
to some of the core servers-and-software operations. I do worry things 
are becoming a bit like a Big Nonprofit, though, even verging onto some 
NGO ambitions, while not being 100% clear to the outside world that 
that's the direction we're going--- the outside world still thinks we're 
struggling to raise money to pay for bandwidth and colo space. I would 
guess the same is true of many Wikipedians as well; I only recently 
realized how much the Foundation has grown in the past 3 years, without, 
as far as I can tell, it ever being an explicit decision to expand 
scope... just sort of happened. Not entirely comfortable with it, but 
eh, I guess that's how things go, and it *does* at least still keep the 
lights on at *.wikipedia.org, which is what I care about.

-Mark