James-
Wiki's phenomenal growth requires constant
upgrading of technology to give
you the best service possible. Giving that service requires funding. You now
can donate money to help your wikipedia remain the fastest growing
encyclopædia on the internet. For more information, see [[Wikipedia
donations]].
I don't particularly care either way, but I will point out that I think
that direct, honest, personal messages -- "We have a server problem, she's
not gonna take much more, Cap'n!" -- are part of Wikipedia's charm. A
polished PR message that glosses over our well known performance and
reliability problems creates distance between the different layers of
Wikipedia, and that kind of distance may actually make people less likely
to donate. I consider it a problematic approach to apply classical PR
strategies to online communities, because the social interaction creates
completely new requirements of communication.
As a matter of fact, I believe the best course of action would be to make
the message editable at least by sysops, which is something that should be
possible soon with all MediaWiki texts if I understood Tim Starling
correctly.
Yes, all messages accessible with wfMsg() will be editable. I'm not sure
how soon it will be -- the entire development branch needs to be tested
extensively, including profiling runs with memcached enabled.
The only messages which are not effectively editable are database error
messages and a few similar things, where infinite recursion would result
if database access was attempted.
Regarding the donations header: does JT have a specific proposal which
will fit on one line?
-- Tim Starling