On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Marcus Buck wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
And I find it interesting that you say that fundraisers are necessary to keep the servers up. The fundraiser is planned to earn over 15 million $ between November and January. The rates in other months are at about 0.2 million $. 12 months at 0.2 million each are 2.4 million $ in non-fundraiser donations. Hosting only costs 1.837 million $. So the servers wouldn't go down without a fundraiser. Of course I support the Fundraiser, but I don't accept it as a valid reason if you tell me that it is necessary to delay projects that improve the actual _content of our projects_.
Without our fundraising team, there would be no money to spend on the projects that you nominate, regardless of how important we think they are.
I think I speak for us all when I say that we're incredibly grateful for the work that the fundraising team does in keeping Wikimedia running – one small part of that being the great things that our engineering team works on.
Perhaps your time would be better-spent arguing for the importance of projects that you feel are neglected, rather than picking holes in projects that you think might be unnecessary. Though I might say that this really is a "big picture" thread, and it might not be constructive to argue with individual decisions at this time.