Sí, va bene, autoincensante, parziale e soprattutto la solita strategia per rispondere alle critiche, però si potrebbe far di peggio nel riassumere ciò che di rilevante è successo nell'ultimo anno per chi non avesse seguito tutto giorno per giorno o viceversa si fosse perso nella quotidianità delle notizie.
Nemo -------- Messaggio Originale -------- Oggetto: Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion Data: Sat, 1 Jan 2011 15:50:18 -0800 Da: Erik Moeller 2011/1/1 Domas Mituzas > It is not obvious how much money is "urgent", more urgent than the need to > read the article. > It is not obvious how much money is sooooo urgent that it needs to distract > me from reading the article by blinking. > It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people > from reading the article until they donate. Hi Domas, happy new year to you and to everyone! :-) Asking a reader to make a donation is by definition a distraction from what they came to do. The question has always been, and continues to be, how we want to balance this distraction away from the utility that Wikimedia projects provide (i.e. instant access to information), with the need to raise funds that will not only permit us to maintain, but increase that utility. I don't see anything wrong at all with messages that signal increased urgency as the fundraiser draws to a close. Nor do I see a mildly animated banner in the last 48 hours of the year (and the fundraiser) which reminds people about tax-deductible donations and seeks to energize a final push for the remaining funds towards the goal, as a violation of the contract between us and our readers. That being said, I don't want to dismiss or diminish concerns about where that balance should be. Indeed, the size and graphical visibility of the banners this year have certainly pushed my own pain points as to what I consider an acceptable balance. At the same time, I've had countless conversations in past years with people who didn't even notice that we were fundraising. To a certain extent, touching those pain points is necessary to even register with people who have both the ability and desire to support us. The fundraising team has continually applied judgment regarding this balance. - For the first time, banners were completely disabled for registered users later in the campaign, because there was simply no justification for a continued aggressive ask from volunteers, who very likely had already donated if they wanted to. This will likely become standard practice in future, at least after some initial period in which everyone sees the banners. - In spite of the proven effectiveness of the Jimmy appeal, the team switched away from it for extended periods of time, for example to run appeals from individual Wikipedia editors, for no other reason than to reduce "message fatigue" and annoyance, even though these banners didn't perform as well. More graphic banners were also substituted with less visually strong ones during parts of the campaign for the same reason, and different variants were continually tested to identify "the least annoying message that works". - We needed to balance our desire to not overuse certain messages with the goal to end the fundraiser as early as possible. As every year, we've upheld our commitment to stop running fundraising banners the moment we're confident that we've made our goal -- and we've done so more quickly than ever in recent history, as can be seen on <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics>. Needless to say, certain ideas were off the table from the beginning (including of course interstitials and the like). To be sure, this year's campaign has certainly pushed the envelope to meet its ambitious goal. Prior to this year, we didn't really have a good sense exactly what the ceiling of the fundraiser would be, because we'd never pushed it as hard was we could before we reached our goal. This year's experience will help us to establish realistic targets for next year, which clearly can't represent a similarly ambitious increase. And we'll have many long conversations to see which areas _other than_ more aggressive messaging will likely yield substantial increases in revenue at this point. For example, while we've offered a standard monthly payment mechanism this year, I haven't yet seen revenue projections from this, as well as possible scenarios for expansion. There are various matching gift models that we've never really tried to scale. And we'll want to understand the successes and failures of chapter-based fundraising better. With all that said, I've seen organizations like public broadcasters go down a road of increasingly aggressive fundraising, to the detriment of the actual experience of the product. I think we would be wise to take steps to avoid that, also with an eye to the fact that management changes over time and principles that aren't stated are easily ignored. So I am in favor of drawing a line as to what we consider acceptable and unacceptable fundraising practices. Perhaps that's a conversation that we can have with the Board, as an extension of the first set of principles articulated here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_principles I also think for next year we can and should do more to actually track annoyance: How many people spend less time on site, or close the page they're visiting, because of a banner? How many people accidentally click on the banners without meaning to? Etc. The more hard data we have, the better we can optimize for a positive experience. There are other long-standing ideas, such as making it easier to permanently hide the banners at least after having made a donation, that we should continue to look into. > Now pageviews don't really grow much (the percentage of reach/pageviews is > quite flat), > we don't have more edits, number of active users is flat. According to your own stats as processed by ErikZ, pageviews increased from 8.9B to 13.7B from March 2008 to November 2010. Perhaps not staggering relative growth as in the early years, but fairly dramatic in absolute terms when you consider how many millions of additional people served it represents. Reach among Internet users also continues to grow not just in the US and Europe, but also in key growth regions. For example, reach among Internet users in India has increased from about 26% to 33.5% over the last year, according to comScore. So, we are serving more users than ever (more than 410M a month according to the latest comScore numbers, which if anything are likely to underestimate the real number). We have a greater responsibility in the world than ever. The reason to raise $16M is to meet that responsibility. To meet it, for example, by making sure that we have reliable, distributed backups of all key data; that we won't disappear from the net for extended periods of time if Tampa goes down; that we don't have to rely entirely on the goodwill of a talented database engineer from Lithuania to deal with MySQL woes. But Wikimedia Foundation isn't (and has never been) purely a techno-organization, it's a global educational media organization and world-wide movement for free knowledge, which critically depends on technology to get its work done. WMF has to provide and improve that technology (and recent threads about WYSIWYG and structured data show the degree of interest that people have in WMF doing a lot more), but supporting growing communities like the ones in India, networking with global cultural and educational institutions, supporting Wikimedia chapter work, providing legal safeguards, etc., are just as much part of our mission. The 2010-11 budget represents an increase from 38% to 48% in technology spending, but it also represents significant investments in other programmatic work. And that's a good thing. I'm incredibly proud, for example, that for the first time in Wikimedia's history, WMF has facilitated institutional relationships with leading universities in the US ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Courses ) to improve article content as part of student assignments, with a very substantial amount of content already added, and the foundation for lasting relationships that will boost quality, credibility, and Wikipedia's continued use in the classroom. ( See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-12-27/Ambassadors ). And this is being funded with a grant, not the core operating budget. Yes, it's a US-centric program, but it's a start and a model, and to the extent that we'll invest in related activities out of core funds, we'll do so with an eye to internationalizing. I'm proud of our network of chapter organizations for building more relationships with cultural institutions than ever before, as can be nicely seen in the timeline on <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships>. I was thrilled to see the report of the multi-university writing competition organized with WMF financial support by Wikimedia Indonesia, which greatly boosted editing activity on the Indonesian Wikipedia. <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_ID/Free_Your_Knowledge_Project_2010/Report>. Similarly, I'm fascinated by the many photo competitions organized by Wikimedia Czech Republic, including projects like photo-hunts for scientific and other specialized media <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pictures_of_the_Acquiring_scientific_and_specialized_pictures_grant>. These are just a few examples of chapter work, of course. And I'm pleased that we can support chapters and other volunteers with a growing network of outreach and training resources that can be used at conferences, booths, workshops, seminars, etc., ranging from "First steps" guides to a mini-syllabus and screencasts, video invitations to edit, etc., all cataloged at http://bookshelf.wikimedia.org/ and created using open source tools. I'm able to hold in my hand perhaps the first-ever book of expert-reviewed Wikipedia articles, as described in <http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/encyclopedia-of-life-curates-wikipedias-species-articles/>. Scaling third party review of Wikimedia content could dramatically increase the utility of the projects. On the technology front, in the last year we: - deployed the first design change across Wikimedia projects in a very, very long time, based on the first-ever systematic usability studies of the Wikipedia experience. The changes deployed don't go nearly far enough, but they are important foundations for future work. - activated the mobile gateway as default for suitable smartphones, now serving about 4% of total pageviews; - developed a completely re-vamped media uploading UI, which is currently in public testing on Commons; - began experimentation with OpenWebAnalytics and actively supported its development; - deployed a small scale test of reader feedback tools and began analyzing the results. Again, that's just a selection, and it's leaving aside improvements to testing/QA, recent joined efforts to clear the code review backlog, etc. All this represents growth in our ability to serve our mission; all this represents opportunity; and all of it was unlikely to ever happen with the Wikimedia of yesteryear that could barely keep the lights on. We're learning and improving as we go along, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that a well-funded free knowledge movement is good for the planet. Nobody is interested in growing this movement at the expense of the utility it provides. But grow it we must, and we will. 2010 has seen the Wikimedia movement truly achieve more than it ever has in its history, and that's in very significant part thanks to its ability to obtain public support. I'm incredibly grateful that hundreds of thousands of people believe in the Wikimedia mission. As David put it, they are becoming co-conspirators in our nefarious goal to bring free knowledge to every single person. To a successful and prosperous 2011, -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ WikiIT-l mailing list [email protected] Pagina per iscriversi/disiscriversi: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiit-l
