[Foundation-l] Fundraising banner ad

Tue Oct 23 05:23:10 UTC 2007

Hi,

Thanks for waking me up this morning with a honking great
flashy scrolling monstrosity at the top of every page. The
marquee tag was a nice flashback to 1997.

And how much opportunity for feedback were users given on
this? Not an awful lot. The SVN commit logs show that the
marquee thingy was committed just minutes before appearing
project-wide, for example. I still almost managed to file a
bugzilla request before it showed up.

Now, the way I see things, the Wikimedia Foundation has two
options:

(1) Actually ask for feedback from the community before
making such dramatically visible, or at least allow more
than a few minutes for feedback to present itself.
(2) Make an official announcement that the opinion of the
community does not matter, rather than pretending that it
does.

The choice is yours. (1) would of course be preferable, but
(2) would make an excellent argument for a fork, so feel
free to go ahead and do it.

-Gurch