[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

Sat Mar 5 23:56:02 UTC 2011

On 5 March 2011 23:16, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 March 2011 23:06, Philippe Beaudette <philippe at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> It seems to me that we spent a year building a strategic plan, which
>> included huge business planning components for exactly this conversation....
>
>
> Yes, you'd think lots of smart people had not only thought about this
> precise question in detail, but written down their answers in detail.
> But that can't be the case, because otherwise people wouldn't be
> writing here as if this hadn't in fact happened.

Oh yes a lot of smart people were involved. And yes there is simply
acres of text on the stratergywiki . How much it had to do with the
resulting document when it comes to spending is rather more open to
question.

I draw your attention to page 16.

I admit I didn't follow every part of the stratergywiki debate but I
doubt that anyone proposed admin spending should be front loaded. But
hey at least it's a plan. So we have to wait a bit for the tech stuff
to kick in. Well we are used to that (first rule of getting things
done on wikipedia, if you are not a programer stick to solutions that
don't need code changes). Still its coming right. Well.

If we turn to page 6  we see that the foundation aims to increase the
total number  of people served to by wikipedia to 1 billion. That's an
increase of 150%. This is the currently proposed methiods of doing so
basically boil down to "we hope to do a little PR" but meanwhile
linear growth would get us to around 710 million an increase of 78%.
Worse still from a financial POV the obvious growth areas are less
affluent than the US and western europe. Why is this a problem?
Because the budget is meant to grow by 155%. The entire plan beyond
"build it and they will come" (a good plan but in this case the stats
say not enough will come) is:

Expand public awareness and support
for the Wikimedia movement.
•	Spread information about Wikimedia’s
mission, vision, values and practices.
Help people better understand our
work, and motivate them to help us
do it

Thats it. Everything else is build it and they will come. It not much
to bet quite a budget increase on. And yet nowhere in the document do
we encounter any statements about what happens if the money isn't
there.

-- 
geni