On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 5:05 PM, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are there any reasons not to allow donors to earmark categories? I feel an instinctive and passionate loathing for this proposal. However, instinct and loathing are not very positive grounds on which to argue a position, as I once tried to explain to a large bloke in a pub as he repeatedly punched me in the face. So I shall try to rein in my passions and argue with the logic of an automaton. Firstly, such earmarking would turn a donation into a kind of popularity vote. The populace decides what the priorities are. Voting can be very good, we are all democratic now, but voters must be informed citizens. I believe the current percentage of Wikipedia visitors that edits rather than stopping at just consuming the material is something like 0.01%. I would assume that the great majority of donors are readers of articles and have never been anywhere near a mailing list like this one, or looked at Meta-Wiki, or even visited our proposals pages, or the strategy wiki, or really given much thought about the fact that a Foundation runs Wikipedia. They may not even know it's a charity. You are proposing that this unthinking and uninterested mass present us with a few shakes of the Magic 8 Ball that the WMF will then feel bound by? Secondly, you state that perhaps 30 options for earmarking could be presented to a potential donor, when I believe it's been shown that users interact with things at a proportion inverse to the number of options; the donation interface should be as clean and unintimidating as possible or we are in danger of alienating people right on the cusp of acting as we would hope and wish. Finally, we've just had an extensive Strategy process and the community was involved. Regardless of what you think of the outcomes (for me, I was disappointed that what came out was painted in broader strokes than I had imagined and would have liked), if we were to now say "actually, forget all that. Forget Strategy happened. Let's direct our energies according to the flighty whims of someone who'd never asked themselves a pertinent question until seeing a humungous list of radio buttons pop up on their screen and clicked one of the first four cos it sounded like a good thing and four is the limit of their Twitterised attention span. The Strategy Process was the community's way of influencing priorities. Those priorities will need to be funded by the donations. This ship has sailed. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
