Hi!
I think one point is skipped, before this should be discussed at all: why is it not possible to move a banner to another month? This question needs an answer first. Each time this problem occurs, multiple years now in different occasions, the fundraising team says they can't move the banner, but they have never provided any reasonable explanation for that at all.
Because of the fundraising banner, this community project and the content of both Wikipedia and Commons experience a huge loss. What makes the loss is worth it for the movement?
That is the core question that needs an answer first in my opinion.
Romaine
2015-08-20 7:26 GMT+02:00 Risker risker.wp@gmail.com:
I can understand the frustration that members of WMIT are expressing here, but I also see Fundraising's point. I wonder if there are not some other options that could be considered. For example, instead of a banner, perhaps a big bright button on the sidebar that says "Upload images for Wiki Loves Monuments here!" may be technically feasible. It's not quite the equivalent of a banner, but it does address the wayfinding issue at least. (I think that's possibly the biggest downside of not having the WLM banners in rotation.)
Let's give ourselves permission to think outside the box a bit here; both of these activities are valuable and important to our movement, each of them have different but viable reasons for wanting to proceed during that specific period. There are a lot of smart people reading this mailing list. I'd like to think between the several-hundred of us we might be able to come up with a solution that works to accommodate both groups.
Risker/Anne
On 20 August 2015 at 01:19, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, Andrew is right. Navigation is a very important focus point of organising every Wiki Loves Monuments.
The complexity of the navigation is that MediaWiki and the whole group of Wikimedia wikis is not designed for navigation, but designed for showing content. In the past eight years small improvements have been made in
this
field, but in general speaking it is still not easy to navigate for the majority of the people.
Romaine
2015-08-19 20:45 GMT+02:00 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
I think Andrew is right: the WLM banner serves as a pointer, and it's
very
easy to remember "go on Wikipedia and click into the banner on the
top".
It's much more difficult to remember the strange name of the contest
(in
Italy it's still called "Wiki Loves Monuments", even if it's English).
And of course we do not have good analytics for the banner: nobody
knows
homw many page views there are in a single wiki per day, so we cannot
count
the clickthroughs (which we have as the link is on a WLM landing page).
Aubrey
On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Andrew Gray <
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk>
wrote:
On 19 August 2015 at 14:26, Sam Klein sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu
wrote:
There's a more general problem here we should fix:
We already know that effectiveness of any single banner drops off dramatically after the first few views. So there's rarely a reason
to
run
a continuous banner -- certainly not if there are other banners to
run.
I think we should be cautious about using our fundraising experience to predict the efficiency of 'delayed call-to-action' banners like
WLM
- to my mind they seem to function in quite different roles.
The fundraising banner is calling for an immediate action. You see
it,
and you either donate or you don't. If you decide not to donate, you probably won't decide to donate on seeing it tomorrow, either; while if you have donated, you're probably not going to donate again. So
the
banner being repeated doesn't gain us much, and it has progressively less value on the third, fourth, fifth appearances. There are relatively few people who see a fundraising banner and decide "I'll sleep on it", then come back tomorrow and donate. And if they *do*, well - there's a donate link on every page, once they're looking for it.
However, WLM is calling for a delayed action - "go off, do something, and come back again to tell us about it".
The most desired outcome is probably that a previously uninvolved person will see it, click through, think "that sounds fun", and go
off
to take some photos - after all, it's running all month, they can do it at the weekend. A few days later they come back, and want to
upload
their photos... but if the banner's not there on Wikipedia, they
won't
really know where to go. They might not remember the name ("Wiki something?"), making it hard to search for the contest, and they probably didn't bookmark the WLM pages. There isn't anything else on the page that would help to take them there, and if they're not involved in the projects already they probably won't know where the information's likely to be. If we can't make sure they can find WLM easily when they return, then we've wasted the original call to action, we've wasted the potential contributions, *and*, most importantly, we've wasted their time and goodwill.
I think this difference in intended response styles makes it hard to generalise from the "diminishing returns" experienced on fundraising. Yes, a repeated banner will get progressively diminishing clickthroughs. But with WLM, those second clickthroughs in some ways provide the "value" to the first clickthrough - they need to return
to
make the campaign a success, which isn't really a concern for fundraising. We need to make sure that that channel is open and visible in some way when they come back.
Andrew.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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