[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

Sat Mar 5 12:48:48 UTC 2011

church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
> However the main point of mail was to discuss how we're going to raise
> funds without being annoying to readers, and I welcome any input from
> WMF staff, chapters and volunteers :-)

There's a fairly easy solution: raise less money. It costs about $2
million/year to keep the Wikimedia wikis running. That gets raised fairly
quickly (it took about five days for the 2010 fundraiser) without many
annoying banners. :-)

I think a lot of people choose not to donate because they feel Wikimedia
doesn't need the money. They feel that the money is being spent on ways to
add more staff (fundraising and non-fundraising), not to keep the site
operational. And in large part, what people think is mostly right. It's a
fairly small, quirky pool of people who donate to Wikimedia; this applies to
both financial and non-financial donors.

While most donations come from people outside the Wikimedia (editing)
community, the people within the community often feel that the very small
staff of the past was more productive, more agile, less bloated, and overall
more efficient than the larger staff of today.

There's also a view that the "wait till the end" approach isn't the best or
most effective approach to take. There were prototype donation buttons for
the sidebar that were made years ago, but that have never been implemented
on a content project, as far as I know. You can view them in the sidebar at
<http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>. These are arguably less annoying
than large banners and could be used throughout the year to raise money,
rather than the current approach, which consists of increasingly annoying
banners to reach an arbitrary goal.

I'm not saying I agree with all of these points, but they're points that
I've heard mentioned both privately and publicly, and I think they're
relevant to any discussion about how to raise funds.

MZMcBride