This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
Nearly all participants agreed that the banner texts are at least partly untruthful, and that soliciting money by misleading readers is an unethical and inappropriate use of this project. Specifically, participants clearly identified that banners that state or imply any of the following are not considered appropriate on the English Wikipedia:
A significant minority of participants objected to running banner campaigns at all. In my view this is beyond the scope of this RfC – arguably out of the scope of local discussions on this project entirely. Similarly, there was substantial discussion of the WMF's fundraising model and financing in general which, as several participants noted, is probably better taken up in other venues (e.g. Meta). In any case, no consensus was reached on these issues.
Few participants explicitly supported the banners. Many of those that did acknowledged the problems summarised above, but concluded that the banners were acceptable because they were effective (at raising money), comparable to similar campaigns by other organisations, and/or are an improvement over the WMF's compaigns in previous years. A number of members of WMF staff and the WMF Board of Trustees were amongst the most vocal in support of the banners. It is worth noting that, though their participation is welcome as anyone else's, it also carries no more weight than anyone else's. Their comments (understandably) tended to focus on the potential ramifications that changes to fundraising on the English Wikipedia, which constitutes a significant portion of the Foundation's income, could have on the rest of the movement. Like critical comments from opposers on movement finances in general, I considered this discussion largely irrelevent in assessing consensus on the questions posed by this RfC. To the extent that they engaged with the specific objections summarised above, a number of supporters, including several Board members, acknowledged that there were problems with the fundraising text that the WMF has placed on the English Wikipedia, though they disagreed on whether this is a fit topic for discussion on this project.
There was also significant discussion of how this consensus should be enforced, if the WMF chooses not to modify the banners before running them. This is a fraught topic given that our policies state that authorised acts of the WMF Board take precedence over consensus on this project, but that attempts to actually apply this principle have historically proved controversial. No consensus was reached on this issue, which is also strictly speaking outside the scope of this RfC. But taking off my closer's hat for a moment, I would like stress that this needn't come up – the preferred outcome for almost all participants, I believe, is that the English Wikipedia community and relevant WMF staff can come to an agreement on the content of fundraising banners.
– Joe ( talk) 12:22, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
Are the WMF's banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign appropriate? If they are not, what changes need to be made before the campaign can start?
Note that due to the WMF not providing a complete listing only four examples are available; a sampling of banners run by the WMF between September and November 2022 may be indicative of what content the other banners will contain. 05:47, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Name | Banner | Sticky Banner |
---|---|---|
Desktop large | To all our readers in Country, |
If Wikipedia has given you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate. |
Desktop small | We ask you, humbly: don't scroll away. |
This isn't a paywall |
Mobile large | To all our readers, |
None |
Mobile small | Hi. This isn’t the first time we’ve interrupted you recently, but only 2% of our readers give. This Day we humbly ask you to help sustain Wikipedia. We don't run ads, and we never have. All we ask is $2.75 if you can afford $2.75, or $25 if you can afford $25. Please don’t scroll away. |
Please, don’t ignore this message: be the rare exception who gives us $2.75. |
See below for comment from the WMF.
If opposing, please specify what changes need to be made to the banners before the campaign can start.
If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this Tuesday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. The price of a cup of coffee is all we need.This is a lie. If every reader donated just $2.75 then next year we'd see a banner saying "If every person reading this donated just $5.50, our fundraising campaign would be over". It is already true from a financial perspective that
Wikipedia could keep thriving for yearsif the WMF's money was decimated (literally, divided by 10). These banners provably guilt people into donating money they would be better off keeping for their own living costs. The English Wikipedia serves a large number of readers worldwide, many of whom live in countries where incomes are much smaller than the U.S. Even for donations within the U.S. and similar countries, many readers are pressured to give more than they should. Read Thomas' comment here: meta:Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#Shame_on_you_WMF!_Shame! I have heard from those that run OTRS that these messages are commonplace, though Thomas' was a rare on-wiki one. More fundamentally, the nature of banners asking readers to donate misinforms them about how they can support Wikipedia. We have a crisis of lack of admins. We have a crisis of small bus factors in areas from NPP to bot maintenance. We have a crisis of editor retention. The principal way that a reader can support a wiki is by editing. Where are the editor recruitment banners? With our numbers in decline and malicious agents ( UPE) on the rise, there has never been a more harmful time for our website to seemingly promote donation of money as the primary way in which readers can support Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation has exceeded its Endowment target. Why are they actively fundraising? What is the target amount for the current fundraising period, which group of volunteers has undersigned the target, and when will the fundraising end? Until the en.wiki community actively endorse the WMF's fundraising target, there should be no banners on our website. — Bilorv ( talk) 22:48, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
humbly ask you to protect Wikipedia,
please take a minute to secure [Wikipedia's] future by making a donation,
This day we ask you to help us sustain Wikipedia). The sample banners also present worse examples of this, like
humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia’s independence.
A similar issue is with the implication in some banners that Wikipedia might need to resort to advertising or a subscription service to remain online if donations fall. This can be seen prominently in the sample banners which say things like We don’t charge a subscription fee, and Wikipedia is sustained by the donations of only 2% of our readers. Without reader contributions, big or small, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.
, but it can also be seen in the example banners which say We don't run ads, and we never have ... Without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.
I also oppose the section on Here’s what your donation enables:
; given the issues we have had receiving support from the WMF in key areas such as New Page Patrol and
WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU it seems dishonest to place so much focus on improvements the WMF make to Wikipedia and the support the WMF provides for volunteers.
The banners should also make clear the distinction between the WMF and Wikipedia; one of the sample banners did this (we humbly ask you to support the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.
), and I believe all banners should do the same.
Finally, the WMF said that in response to editor concerns they no longer use the term 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way
. As such, it is disappointing that they continue to use phrase 98% of our readers don't give; they keep reading
, which is functionally identical.
BilledMammal (
talk) 22:55, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
t
c
23:21, 14 November 2022 (UTC)Elon can't buy this. Give us $2 so it stays that way.Levivich ( talk) 06:48, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
We ran the banners for 4 days towards the end of the campaign, and the overall result of the new banner was a 65% decrease in donations.and
this exact message won't reach the revenue target for the year. Although WMF did state that
there are interesting concepts to further develop, this is insane. The body owning Wikipedia values adding even more money to their piggy bank over truth. Dialmayo ( talk) ( Contribs) she/her 16:22, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Here's what your donation enables: ... Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day– what? Writers here don't get any money.) BeanieFan11 ( talk) 21:37, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every dayis revealing: the WMF's monetary support for volunteers is limited to choosing a favored few to give tickets to junkets, and to underwriting regional associations who see the WMF as presiding over the projects rather than supporting them. The WMF shouldn't be fundraising to finance editors, doesn't need to fundraise any further to do its job, and is asking for money yet again in ways that show it's lost sight of its role, or, worse, seeks to mislead peopleso it can do things other than what they believe they are donating for. Yngvadottir ( talk) 11:12, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
humbly ask you to support Wikipedia's independence.Giving money to the WMF is not supporting Wikipedia's independence. Arguably it's doing the opposite. This RfC speaks loud and clear to the Foundation's Board that the English Wikipedia community is independent. I support a short-term, first-time block on the fundraising banners (12 to 24 hours) as a behavioral sanction on the Foundation. This block must be allowed to stand in order to re-establish or reconfirm the independence of the English Wikipedia editing community. If the Foundation prevents or reverts such a block before it's run its course that would signal and establish that the English Wikipedia community is not an independent equal of the Foundation (separation of powers) but rather is subservient to the Foundation. I'm more concerned about the Foundation's independence than Wikipedia's. The more influential Wikipedia becomes, thanks to Google, Alexa and Siri, and the larger the pot of cash under Foundation stewardship grows, the more vulnerable the Foundation becomes. What's stopping some billionaire like Elon Musk from bribing 50% + 1 of the Board members with cash (say $100 million each) in return for nominating Elon's picks to the board and then resigning their seats? wbm1058 ( talk) 15:02, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
try and optimize for showing the least number of banners per reader to hit the budget; the number of banners per reader has remained constant at 10, and the duration of the campaign has been slowly growing, from 31 days in 2020 to 33 days in 2022. I'm also not convinced that they stop when they reach the budget; when was the last time the campaign was terminated before it reached its scheduled end date?
t
c
23:03, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
in my case I've specifically done fundraising as a job at the WMF in the past). Should WMF employees who chose to !vote in this discussion clearly disclose their conflict of interest, or do the unique circumstances of this discussion make it appropriate to not do so? BilledMammal ( talk) 23:50, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
Wikipedia … is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. Wikipedia is maintained by a nonprofit … Without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.I understand that lay readers may perhaps be better served by a simpler, more idealized view of Wikipedia's workings; nevertheless, this phraseology discomforts me slightly. The choice of libraries and public parks as a simile is (if I may speculate slightly) perhaps indicative of a cathedral mentality on the WMF's part: both examples are maintained by a centralized group of custodians or stewards, who provide a service for the public to see and use but not to touch (i.e., alter). Off the top of my head, I can't think of a better, more volunteer-focused analogy; perhaps a blood bank? I also don't quite like the words "maintained" and "run"; they carry the connotation that the WMF is directly involved in writing and editing the encyclopedia, which is a slight misconception. Perhaps "hosted" and "support", respectively, would be better word choices. In another banner, it's claimed that one's
donation enables: Improvements on Wikipedia and our other online free knowledge projects [and] Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day.It's technically true, perhaps, but I think it's stated a bit too strongly, implying (incorrectly) that the WMF is directly involved (to any significant degree) in the everyday affairs of the encyclopedia.Of course, there are probably more salient issues than my rhetorical quibble: the size of the WMF's piggy bank, the way it's publicly portrayed, its intransparency, etc. Perhaps others more knowledgeable than me can address those concerns. Shells-shells ( talk) 00:06, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
t
c
08:23, 15 November 2022 (UTC)the rate of growth seen in past years will not continue in the 2022−2023 fiscal year as we stabilize our growth and also ensure that new resources are delivering maximum impact for our mission? BilledMammal ( talk) 11:32, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Wakelamp d[@-@]b ( talk) 06:12, 23 November 2022 (UTC)"... the community considered 13 proposals for fixing perceived flaws in NSPORTS. A fundamental problem was that, by the time these proposals were made, most editors had lost interest. For example, the main proposal had over 100 editors weigh-in, but of the 13 other proposals, only two got over 65 participants, and most struggled to get even half the participation of the main proposal. While proposals with 50 participants could achieve consensus, editors tended to be evenly split on most questions."
t
c
08:04, 15 November 2022 (UTC)For example, we have held two events in the last two weeks where senior staff and board members made presentations and directly answered questions from donors.Are these presentations and QA sessions open to all donors, or only major donors? BilledMammal ( talk) 09:29, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
via Endowment | via WP | |
---|---|---|
Transaction fee | 0.35 | 0.35 |
Bank processing fees | 0.10 | 0.10 |
Donation Admin, IT, analystics, PR | 2.00 | 2.00 |
WMF Admin and grants | 2.00 | |
Management, bonuses,and in kind | 1.00 | |
WMF endowment | 1.00 | |
Tides endowment | 1.00 | |
Tides grant transaction | 2.00 | |
Grantee admin | 0.35 | |
Beneficiary | 3.20 | |
enWP, Wiktionary, Wikinews etc. Commons, Servers, and any dev requested by Wikis | 2.00 | |
Other servers/translation | 1.55 | |
Wikimania and Country chapters | 1.00 | |
Total | 10.00 | 10.00 |
The data in this table looks very different than anything I have ever seen. Do you mind including the source? I can direct you to a third-party source that reviews our financial information, Charity Navigator. They publish a three-year average of WMF's financials in three categories: Fundraising (which includes payment processing fees, fundraising staff, our fundraising technical infrastructure, events, mailings, etc.) is 11.5 percent of our expenses. Administration (Finance, legal, HR, governance, etc.) is 13.8 percent of our expenses. Programmatic work (technology, product, grants to affiliates, etc. is 74.5 percent of our expenses. This ratio of programmatic expenses to administration and fundraising expenses is considered good enough for us to receive Charity Navigator's highest rating. Lgruwell-WMF ( talk) 22:38, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I hope someone is listening: If you mean us, we all are - very intently. If you mean the WMF, well it would appear that they only scan the comments and very superficially. This goes not only for @ Seddon, JBrungs (WMF), JVillagomez (WMF), MeganHernandez (WMF), RAdimer-WMF, and KStineRowe (WMF): and the rest of the 26 employees of the fundraising team, but also for all the staff in Product and Engineering. We have forced the WMF into according us a video conference with them, but the very main objective of the exercise has been met with basically a 'not enough money'. The question therefore remains: What does the WMF actually do with it's glut of funds from the donations that the volunteers' work brings in? They might be giving it away to other charities or hiring their friends as consultants. These are the details that are not revealed in their so-called transparency.
"Salaries and wages" includes salary, benefits, retirement, wellness, and payroll taxes for full-time and part-time staff members in the US and outside of the US employed by Wikimedia Foundation or its Employer of Record.Staff outside the US employed via an Employer of Record are are a class of contractor whose pay is (I am not an accountant) reported on the Form 990 under salaries and wages. Seddon talk 21:07, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Expenses incurred for services provided in the United States (for example [...] services provided over the Internet) that include recipients both inside and outside the United States shouldn't be reported in Part I.Seddon talk 02:35, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
I think it's vital that we focus our critiques and energies on the organisation and its practices. These question have been side stepped, and I still strongly condemn both the tone of these banners and their use on this Wikipedia. Let's get on with it and do what has to be done: either the WMF withdraws them, or have them locally banned. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:48, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
One "easy" thing to get started would be to allocate 5% of the WMF's budget to something like the "community tech wishlist". Yes. Something like this is needed (exact percentage can be worked out later). Community tech/the Wishlist is the volunteer's main way of requesting software, and it seems like this is understaffed. We are a rich organization, but as volunteers, sometimes it doesn't feel like that wealth is shared with us in tangible ways, e.g. fulfilling our software requests in a timely manner. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 02:02, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
43 percent - direct support to websites (engineering improvements, design, legal support) 33 percent - support to the volunteer community through grants, programs, training, tools, advocacy, and other support 24 percent - other (14 percent on administration and governance, 10 percent on fundraising)
t
c
16:29, 21 November 2022 (UTC)From 18 November to 20 November, the WMF is planning to run a low level banner test as the final test before the campaign is scheduled to be launched on 29 November. Based on the overwhelming response in opposition here I've asked them to cancel that planned test. BilledMammal ( talk) 02:44, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
making edits with which they do not actually agree) BilledMammal ( talk) 03:57, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest reframing this discussion. The decision to halt WMF fundraising is a drastic step, but there's clearly growing support for it. Regardless of whether this represents a minority in the grand scheme of the English Wikipedia community, there don't appear to be many willing to jump in the line of fire in defending the fundraising, so canceling the banners (or a very ugly conflict) is a real possibility. I still say the main reason we're here is because of widespread hurt and resentment towards how the foundation has been run (and specifically how money is spent). There will be a few people who say "no banners no matter what" or "burn it to the ground", but that is an extreme position. For most of us, I suspect it's entirely possible the WMF could change how it does things enough that fundraising would return to being an infrequent annoyance (like all fundraising) rather than a reminder of the distance between the volunteers and the foundation.
Throughout this discussion, some people are offering concrete suggestions, but the suggestions vary by person, and are all undercut by the number of people who'd sooner write "WMF sucks, don't donate" than have any fundraising. That's in part because of how this RfC is framed: it's only about a yes/no to fundraising banners, without any attempt to turn it into something that actually benefits the community (except insofar as not running banners benefits the community). Meanwhile, we're coming up on the time when the banners run, and a sizable staff has to scramble to figure out how to interpret the opinions and emotions expressed here in a short window of time (it would be entirely valid to point out that people have been raising these issues for some time, however, so they should've been able to see this coming).
We've made it clear there's a lot of hurt here, and that there are a lot of people willing to take drastic measures because of it. Rather than just decide to obstruct fundraising, however, let's shift conversation to conditions to continue.
I still believe that most of the people who are upset about the banners wouldn't be so upset if they didn't have such a problem with how the foundation allocates its money. That makes me wonder what sort of change in the WMF budget would be enough. Above I made one suggestion. What if the WMF guaranteed that 5% of its annual budget for the next five years would be dedicated to community-selected projects (call it an expansions of the community tech wishlist or something else, but it would be entirely for tasks selected by the community and carried out by WMF staff, without the need for a grants process and without the need for volunteers to do the labor of management, hiring, etc.)? Think of all that could do for us (not to mention readers). Of course, they can't implement that in a matter of a couple weeks, but it's not impossible for them (the board, I suppose) to make that decision. If bureaucracy moves too slowly, we could also say "this is the last time you get to run fundraising until you do this" (which gives them more time to figure things out without jacking things up in the short-term). Thoughts? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:42, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
they approve it and then they never do it- the point here is that there are people on-wiki willing to put a stop to on-wiki fundraising efforts. They could theoretically also implement something like superprotection to force the banners through, too, but why would you get into such a massive, damaging conflict with the volunteers when you can allocate a piece of the budget to something they want instead? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:55, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
Dear all,
I would like to give you some more background and information on the fundraising banners. I have shared the latest banners that we are using for the banner pre-tests leading up to the English campaign to non-logged-in users. As our campaigns are built on continuous iteration and improvement, the team will continue to incorporate your feedback and ideas into our testing in the next few weeks, as well as daily iteration throughout the campaign.
Over the last year, some editors have provided feedback on messaging they would like to see changed in banners. Some of those changes we have already made and are listed below. The team combines feedback from editors, along with feedback from readers and donors, to shape our campaigns.
Example current message (this is our Desktop Large message which is shown once to non-logged in users, then smaller banners afterwards):
To all our readers in the U.S., Please don’t scroll past this. This Monday, for the 1st time recently, we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to support Wikipedia’s independence. Only 2% of our readers give. Many think they’ll give later, but then forget. If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this Monday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. We don't run ads, and we never have. We rely on our readers for support. We serve millions of people, but we run on a fraction of what other top sites spend. Wikipedia is special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. We ask you, humbly: please don’t scroll away. If Wikipedia has given you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate. Show the world that access to neutral information matters to you. Thank you.
Example current message (this is our Mobile Large message which is shown once to non-logged in users, then smaller banners afterwards):
To all our readers,
Please don’t scroll past this. This Monday, for the 1st time recently, we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to support Wikipedia’s independence. Only 2% of our readers give. Many think they’ll give later, but then forget. If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this Monday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. The price of a cup of coffee is all we need.
We don't run ads, and we never have. We rely on our readers for support. We serve millions of people, but we run on a fraction of what other top sites spend.
Wikipedia is special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. Wikipedia is maintained by a nonprofit, and the 58 million articles that compose it are free. Without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.
We want to make sure everyone on the planet has equal access to knowledge. We still have work to do.
If Wikipedia provided you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, please take a minute to secure its future by making a donation. Thank you.
You can compare this most recent banner to the banner that was used in December 2021.
Here are examples of messages the team is currently working on. We would appreciate feedback on our meta page around these ideas and welcome more ideas we can try in the upcoming campaign:
In the past year, the fundraising team has made the following changes to campaigns in direct response to volunteer feedback. We are grateful for the input and partnership with volunteers in improving campaigns for readers.
In the creative process, the team uses feedback from readers, donors, and volunteers to generate new messages that will resonate with our audiences. We are always looking for new language suggestions to reach our readers to help them learn more about Wikipedia while we ask for their support. For example, the Dutch community recently wrote a fully original banner that the team tested during the Dutch campaign in September. We ran the banners for 4 days towards the end of the campaign, and the overall result of the new banner was a 65% decrease in donations. While this exact message won't reach the revenue target for the year, there are interesting concepts to further develop. We followed up on this test with a productive conversation with the community after the campaign, and we are planning to work together on incorporating more of the ideas from that session into future banners for the Netherlands.
As the team is actively preparing the upcoming End of Year campaign and developing new messaging, we would greatly appreciate constructive feedback and ideas for ways we can reach our donors while raising the revenue target this year. If you have messaging ideas you would like to see tested, please share them with Julia or leave a message here or on our meta talk page. We will be here, reading and listening to the discussion. The work of the global community of editors makes Wikipedia a useful resource for readers. We thank you for your work and welcome your input on the fundraising campaign.
Thank you.
Posting on behalf of JBrungs, RAdimer-WMF ( talk) 23:09, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
@ JBrungs (WMF) and RAdimer-WMF: so, with all that extra money coming in, why were the WMF planning on reducing the Community Wishlist Survey from once every year to once every two years, instead of increasing the size of the team working on these long-neglected wishes? Why should we take any statement above (or in the banners) about supporting Wikipedia and its volunteers serious when in reality community wishes are neglected and underfunded, volunteer created improvements and patches are being stalled, and critical voices at technical places (like Phabricator) are being brutally silenced? Fram ( talk) 09:19, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
Why do we need to vote again? Just keep working on the wishes from the last survey? What other ideas besides moving to an every other year format did the Community Wishlist team consider? The goal of "we would like to spend more time working on projects and less administering the wishlist process" feels reasonable to me but gosh does that announcement and frankly your response here feel tone deaf to me which is not something I associate with your work.
Either way, the team is gratified to know that people appreciate our work, and our commitment to working on projects that are important to the community is unchanged.feels like something you say internally so that the people on the team aren't upset by the negative reaction to this announcement. I think several Wikipedians have failed at basic decency towards WMF staff in this discussion and so I understand your choice to jump into this discussion and how that speaks well of you as a colleague. But as a manager whose responsibilities are to work with the community, I hope you can see the community's desire to increase the budget of this area - which is congruent with the way funds have been raised in the past - not to make a more efficient use of the moneys and would communicate with us accordingly. Best. Barkeep49 ( talk) 06:44, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
I think several Wikipedians have failed at basic decency towards WMF staff in this discussion- I'm not one of those people who look under every rock to see if there is an excuse for claiming PA, but I can take the hint while AGF is not a suicide pact; to be quite blunt however, it's no more than how a manager in a company would address the staff if they were not quite doing the right thing for the major stakeholders], and we volunteers - major stakeholders - have no other way of hauling the staff into the office and give them a dressing down. What happens in reality however, is that those of the staff who happen to be admins (and possibly other admins) threaten the volunteers with sanctions for speaking up–the volunteers have no trade union or employment laws on their side.
"Either way, the team is gratified to know that people appreciate our work, and our commitment to working on projects that are important to the community is unchanged"are purely patronising, just like the way the BoT talks to us as if we were naughty children asking for too much candy (video evidence exists). It's all enough to make the most dedicated volunteers give up, and what with local governance quirks on top of it, some do.
Hello all. Please find below an official response from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
This movement is built on back-and-forth debate, even when people have strong views and deeply disagree. The Wikimedia Foundation Board acknowledges and respects the mechanisms built by Wikipedia communities to raise issues of concern through the use of RfCs. That said, we are clear that an RfC on English Wikipedia is not the best way to determine the use of global resources that support many other communities who are not present in this RfC discussion, but who would be impacted by it. A forthcoming movement charter may help, but is unlikely to solve the issues being raised right now.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board has been closely watching this RfC since it began last week. Some very reasonable requests to have input into wording of the banners have been raised on this page, along with other overall concerns and questions about fundraising and spending. These are not taken by us lightly, and we have asked Foundation leadership to help us address them while working with the communities over the course of the next year. I would like to share some thoughts as Board Chair, and I have asked a few other Trustees to add their input here as well.
This RfC was started to discuss banners running on English Wikipedia. However, the revenue we raise from this fundraising campaign supports a global technology infrastructure and community needs around the world. Banners on English Wikipedia provide Wikimedia with our largest revenue source. They are one of the reasons we have been able to maintain an ad-free platform, and support work in other regions of the world. They are also consistent with our mission, allowing users to choose to give or not, and protecting our independence. It is therefore clear to the Board that banners need to continue as part of our global revenue strategy.
While this RfC started about banner messaging, the issues raised here cover a much wider scope. I have read the numerous questions about how we allocate our budget to support the mission, the calls for clarity about how we support volunteer needs, feelings of distrust and disconnect, and the desire for more input and collaboration on the work and priorities of the Foundation. As Board Chair and as a longtime Wikimedian, I am sorry that we have gotten to this point. This is a clear signal that we must work even more closely with the communities, including English Wikipedia editors, to identify more productive ways for us to rebuild trust.
In the immediate short term, this includes engaging with the communities on the messaging used in fundraising banners on the projects they contribute to. Of course, there would be reasonable limits on how the input would be implemented. Thank you to those who have already offered constructive suggestions for testing alternative messages for the fundraising team to test and implement over the past weekend.
It is also important to be realistic about what kinds of activities would be at risk if the movement were to stop raising funds from the English banner campaign, ranging from resources to improve our product and technology infrastructure, to grants supporting many other regions of the world, to legal support for community members in need (as a Ukrainian Wikipedian I can tell you that things like this sometimes literally mean a life-or-death situation), for trust and safety, as well as for translations and live interpretation for global communities – to name a few. A funding decrease of this size would impact not just English Wikipedia, but how the Foundation supports many other projects in our global movement.
The Board of Trustees, with the majority of its members selected by Wikimedia communities, is ultimately responsible for the Foundation's budget, its reserves, and how the money is raised. While we can agree that some of the issues raised in this RfC may be valid (and the associated frustration real and understandable), an RfC on a single wiki, is not the way to decide the financial fate of all Wikimedia sites and the movement.
To sum it up:
-- NTymkiv (WMF) ( talk) 18:08, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Reserves are not excess cash: they are money set aside to ensure that we can sustain our mission even in times of difficulty - either to weather the storm (in case of short-term problems) or to allow for some space to make more drastic changes (in case of long-term problems).I would argue that
times of difficultyinclude neglecting your largest stakeholder to the point that they are forced to take drastic action.
In my personal view, the discussion is partly about the division of labor and "ownership" of space. I generally understand that the community may not like some of the messaging. Still, I don't think it is practical or reasonable to assume that the community can have a final say on how fundraising is done through banners - it is, and it should be done by professionals. It is thanks to these professionals that the campaigns last shorter, only as long as they need to run to collect the annual target. To use an analogy: we should not have an RfC about what servers software should we install - while we all have opinions, the bigger picture has to be that some of these decisions need to be left in the hands of staff. Ultimately, I also don't feel that this RfC is ONLY about the current content of some banners.
In a broader perspective, I do not think that English Wikipedia community should be making decisions massively affecting all Wikimedia community. While the banners are indeed shown on English Wikipedia, the revenue they generate supports smaller language communities. Overall, I’m inclined to say that the community as a whole (but not just one language community) should have an opportunity to express objections to some specific wording in our banners if need be, and it is the role of the WMF to hear it and take it into account, meaningfully (but not automatically or blindly), as banner effectiveness obviously cannot be the only criterion. Nevertheless, the community (and especially, just one language community, major as it may be) cannot object to banners as a whole and question the WMF fundraising base model. Pundit| utter 18:23, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
here the argument of one community versus 300 stays quite strongI don’t believe that is a strong argument; I see it as closely related to the suggestion that land votes.
I see many comments on this page about the Foundation's cash reserves and the idea that if we were to stop banner fundraising this year, there would be very little impact to Foundation work because of the ability to dip into those reserves. Reserves are not excess cash: they are money set aside to ensure that we can sustain our mission even in times of difficulty - either to weather the storm (in case of short-term problems) or to allow for some space to make more drastic changes (in case of long-term problems). This feels particularly important as we anticipate another global recession. Earlier this year the Board passed a resolution to create a formal policy for the Foundation to keep between 12-18 months of revenue in reserve (with a target of 18 months). This is aligned with best practices: for instance, according to Charity Navigator (which assesses nonprofits in the US) an organization should have at least 12 months of reserves. The Wikimedia Foundation is currently at approximately 17 months of reserves; they are projected to slightly decrease in the next couple of years, but always staying within that range. If they were to approach 12 months, the Wikimedia Foundation would have to take actions to increase them. Failing to do so would not meet the Wikimedia Foundation responsibility towards the movement. - Laurentius ( talk) 18:31, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation financials, for reference:
Year | Source | Revenue | Expenses | Asset rise | Net assets at end of year |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2021/2022 | $154,686,521 | $145,970,915 | $8,173,996 | $239,351,532 | |
2020/2021 | $162,886,686 | $111,839,819 | $50,861,811 | $231,177,536 | |
2019/2020 | $129,234,327 | $112,489,397 | $14,674,300 | $180,315,725 | |
2018/2019 | $120,067,266 | $91,414,010 | $30,691,855 | $165,641,425 | |
2017/2018 | $104,505,783 | $81,442,265 | $21,619,373 | $134,949,570 | |
2016/2017 | $91,242,418 | $69,136,758 | $21,547,402 | $113,330,197 | |
2015/2016 | $81,862,724 | $65,947,465 | $13,962,497 | $91,782,795 | |
2014/2015 | $75,797,223 | $52,596,782 | $24,345,277 | $77,820,298 | |
2013/2014 | $52,465,287 | $45,900,745 | $8,285,897 | $53,475,021 | |
2012/2013 | $48,635,408 | $35,704,796 | $10,260,066 | $45,189,124 | |
2011/2012 | $38,479,665 | $29,260,652 | $10,736,914 | $34,929,058 | |
2010/2011 | $24,785,092 | $17,889,794 | $9,649,413 | $24,192,144 | |
2009/2010 | $17,979,312 | $10,266,793 | $6,310,964 | $14,542,731 | |
2008/2009 | $8,658,006 | $5,617,236 | $3,053,599 | $8,231,767 | |
2007/2008 | $5,032,981 | $3,540,724 | $3,519,886 | $5,178,168 | |
2006/2007 | $2,734,909 | $2,077,843 | $654,066 | $1,658,282 | |
2005/2006 | $1,508,039 | $791,907 | $736,132 | $1,004,216 | |
2004/2005 | $379,088 | $177,670 | $211,418 | $268,084 | |
2003/2004 | $80,129 | $23,463 | $56,666 | $56,666 |
-- Andreas JN 466 13:19, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
I will keep this fairly brief, and at a high level of principles. I was happy to see a discussion of the specific content of the fundraising banners - I have not always been comfortable with the messaging in some of our past banners (though I'm very comfortable with some messages that at least some people are unhappy about - we can have a longer discussion about that) and I regard it as unfortunate that this RfC veered into a wide range of issues that are very much beyond the scope of that original discussion, and very much beyond the scope of what is suitable for an RfC in English language Wikipedia. We are a global movement with open community processes that are appropriate for that wider discussion, most notably the movement strategy process which resulted in a strategy that demands a level of spending that would be impossible if some of the comments in this RfC were pursued. I would suggest a reboot of that original mission (of examining the banners), and I encourage both the WMF fundraising staff and thoughtful community members to work together to find a way forward that meets our twin objectives of financial health and a trustworthy campaign for the necessary donations.
To say this a different way: the question "are these banners to be run in English appropriate" is a valid one for English Wikipedia, when undertaken in a thoughtful, positive, and collaborative way. Questions like "does the Foundation have too much money?" and "Should the Foundation be a minimalist stub organization spending just a couple million a year to keep the servers running?" are very very far outside the scope of an English Wikipedia RfC, and should be taken up in the right place.
On that latter, much more important question, it is my view that we should be ambitious in both our spending and our fundraising. We have an important goal: a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet, in their own language, and we have an enormous number of challenges to get there. I would personally like to see a significantly increased amount of spending on a variety of efforts to support the growth of Wikipedia in the smaller (for us) languages. To put this into context, today there are only 19 languages with at least 1 million articles, and even that is a generous count due to a few which have extensive low-quality bot translated content.
Certain people in the community like to post numbers in a very accusatory way that anyone serious should see are not proper subjects for accusations, but for praise. The Foundation has a healthy reserve, in line with best practices advocated by major nonprofit governance organizations. The Foundation continues to go from strength to strength in a world where our "competitors" in terms of other large popular Internet sites have much more. Just to give one contemporary example that is on many people's minds: twitter, a toxic cesspit which has done real damage to the world (my opinion, not NPOV!) had revenue last year of over $4.5 billion dollars. I think we should be proud that we are targeting $175 million in revenue by simply asking people for money, and that this money is being spent wisely and carefully - too carefully in my view, and we can discuss that, but what I mean it I would love to some some higher-risk pilot projects with serious funding to tackle community building in some of the largest languages in the world. Hindi, a very important language of India, has only 153,000 articles. If we could spend $20 million a year and jumpstart that growth to get them to a million articles (along with all the other languages of India) that would be amazing - and we are now in a position where such ambitious ideas can begin to take place with some $1-$2 million trials of reasonable ideas - some of which would fail.
In short - I want to see the WMF succeed financially and expand in ways that fulfill our mission. I want all of our banner ads to be honest and thoughtful... and successful.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 19:43, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
If we could spend $20 million a year and jumpstart that growth to get them to a million articles. I think one of the themes of the above discussion is that we feel that not enough money is being spent on things like community tech. It's really hard to get excited about things like an 8 figure risky expansion of another wiki, or knowledge equity grants, or the endowment, until we feel that our issues at home (e.g. community tech) are receiving proper funding.
are very very far outside the scope of an English Wikipedia RfC, and should be taken up in the right place.What is the proper channel? Perhaps the folks in this discussion are not aware of the proper channel, which is part of what has led to this disconnect between how WMF spends donation money, and how English Wikipedians expect WMF to spend donation money. Perhaps some of WMF's community relations folks need to publicize this a little better, for example with watchlist notices on key movement strategy votes. Thanks for listening. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 23:30, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
Having said that, I think everyone - especially sensible people like you - should make it very very clear that it would be absurd to get into some kind of wheel war here. Given that WP:WHEEL permits actions to be reinstated when there is a
clear discussion leading to a consensus decisionin support of the action the only potential wheel warring would be the WMF attempting to block efforts to block the banners. As such, I ask you to clarify this statement: will the WMF respect the result of this discussion, or will they wheel war in an attempt to ensure the banners are displayed? BilledMammal ( talk) 23:35, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
The productive thing coming out of this discussion is consensus to not run these banners. If the WMF does things the volunteer editors object to, they risk losing the volunteer editors. If it's one thing that platform operators have learned over the last 20 years, it's that userbases will move to a new platform given the right conditions. It happened to MySpace and Vine, it's happening to Twitter, and it can happen to the WMF, too. So sure, they legally own the domain name, but that's only as valuable as the volunteers who write the website. The volunteers are the ones with all the power and control, and when they all agree on something, they're pretty much unstoppable. Which is why all the high-ranking WMFers are commenting here: this is an existential crisis for them. If we run no banners this season, they may actually have to cut the budget and possibly reduce the size of the staff, or at least the reserves. And if they run it over objections, another high-profile dispute between the WMF and its own user base will also damage the WMF's reputation and thus its fundraising effectiveness. Levivich ( talk) 14:53, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
once we start calling things "existential crises" and predicting the downfall of Wikipedia...there's no impending doom coming to WikipediaI think you misread/misunderstood what I wrote. I wrote
Which is why all the high-ranking WMFers are commenting here: this is an existential crisis for them.Emphasis on for them, not for us. Not for Wikipedia, for the
high-ranking WMFers. To be clear, the "existential crisis" is that enwiki's users don't allow them to fundraise with banners on enwiki. It's "existential" because, as they themselves have admitted, the WMF absolutely depends on enwiki banners to bring in enough money to pay for the WMF. If we take that away, jobs may be lost at the WMF. Wikipedia, however, will carry on just fine, as you said. Levivich ( talk) 22:00, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
When I was just an editor, I realised that wikimedians tend to live in silos. Some are in one man (or woman) silos where they only edit and refuse to communicate; most of us are in a project silo where we are comfortable and don't want to look beyond it. While I have minor contributions to English Wikipedia, Commons and other projects, my silo was Russian Wikipedia.
The projects under the umbrella of the Russian Chapter are in an interesting position in the Movement, because WMF cannot run banners or fundraise in them otherwise. After all, the Russian government is hostile to what they call "foreign agents", especially those notoriously liberal as Wikipedia. So the Russian Chapter has to fundraise on its own. So why don't they fork, then? Maybe because They still use the servers maintained by WMF, which is especially important now when Russian Wikipedia is virtually the only independent news source not blocked by Putin. Rusian Government is trying to replace Wikipedia by launching their own projects, and they keep crashing because they need more people and infrastructure.
And talking about servers, this year WMF opened a second server centre in Marseille because the infamous Amsterdam one was groaning and sometimes buckling down under the strain of Europe, Africa and Asia requests.
When they were able, Russian wikimedians went to Wikimania and other conferences. For people in the Global North, Trust & Safety are the police that curtails their freedom. For Russian and Belarusian Wikipedians who are being hounded and jailed, T & S is a real help - but you know that I cannot go into the details. The Problem with WMF is that much work goes beyond the public eye.
Btw, when I talk about "Russian", I don't mean just the Russian language. Modern Russia is a former Empire, so the Russian Chapter helps projects in around 30 languages, from Chechen to Bashkir.
I hope you forgive me if I say that in this RfC, English Wikipedians are trying to remain in a silo. The oldest, biggest and arguably the best. But WMF banners not only fundraise for your infrastructure. The banners are a fundraiser for the Movement as a whole. If another global project, such as Commons or Wikidata, tries to do the same, the results will be laughable. Remember what comes with great power. Victoria ( talk) 09:10, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
But you realise that testing new concept banners takes time, we cannot change horses in midstream.Enwiki has been raising these objections for years, and if instead of listening and responding to them the WMF has ignored them and no longer has time to respond to them, then that is the WMF's problem to resolve. BilledMammal ( talk) 10:15, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
it's hard to do anything, because you cannot just pull a couple of lines of code and fix it, everything is interconnectedIt's not that bad, and I am a software engineer and used to be one for Wikimedia. In my view the problem has been management excessively focused on "new shiny" over maintenance, pressure to deliver the minimum viable prototype then move on to the next new shiny thing, forcing out of developers who a manager sees as in the way of their rise to power, and an increasing focus on US culture war issues. Anomie ⚔ 12:56, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
Each country has its own employment, pension, medical coverage laws.This part I know much less about, but doesn't WMF sidestep most of that by not technically "employing" anyone outside the US? Isn't everyone else (with maybe a few exceptions) considered a "contractor" either employed by an employer of record or operating under their country's version of "independent contractor" status? Or did that finally change in the last year or two? Anomie ⚔ 12:56, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
You also say that staff must ultimately be the ones in the charge...but why? The staff are those most qualified to judge what an effective banner will be. They have no more or less competence at judging the morality of any given banner than I do. They also will not have to deal with the negatives on-wiki and through VRT that any banner campaign, but especially fundraising campaigns bring. If you want a global RfC to occur on the matter rather than local, I'd suggest that be unwise or it would require the removal of banners from local communities that otherwise backed their presence if the global majority disagreed.Best, Barkeep49 ( talk) 04:39, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
it would create a super expensive and, likely, highly ineffective system: Our current fundraising system costs $17.5 million (according to the CFO's comment here)... isn't that already super expensive? How much more expensive would it be if communities had the right to veto a banner or participate in its design all the way? BTW, what is our cost-per-banner, and revenue-per-banner? Levivich ( talk) 16:12, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
an RfC on a single wiki, is not the way to decide the financial fate of all Wikimedia sitesis really quite illuminating. The WMF attitude seems to be that when allocating resources, that the English Wikipedia (the indisputable flagship of our free knowledge movement) is just a "single wiki" among 300 wikis, but when it comes to fundraising, it suddenly the most important wiki by far. That is a shockingly hypocritical disconnect from reality and an attitude that illuminates the severe problem we face now in late November 2022. We are ethical people and the ad mongers aren't. Deal with it decisively now. When we PLEAD for better software tools to curate content and communicate with mobile editors for example, we are not asking for things that would benefit the English Wikipedia only. These tools would be for the benefit of editors throughout the Wikimedia Foundation websites. Do editors on our French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias oppose this kind of software support? I do not think so. Anybody who tries to claim that this RFC does not reflect an overwhelming consensus is clearly wrong. Just an example that has nothing to do with the English Wikipedia per se: Year after year, the Android app for uploading photos to Commons has sucked and has deterred good faith contributors, and the WMF has repeatedly failed to deploy a reliable, bug free Android app to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons. Billions of people take photos worldwide on Android devices and it is extremely difficult for any of them to donate their photos under a free license. The app sucks. The app has sucked for years. Millions of dollars pour in and that app still sucks. Why the heck is that? Why can't a smartphone photo contibutor click three or four clearly labelled buttons and freely license their photo? Why does it take a half hour or more, and require a user to uninstall and reinstall the app to upload a single photo? Far smaller organizations deploy apps that work well. The butterfly editors and the dinosaur editors and the tropical storm editors and the asteroid editors may not have commented. They are entirely free to do so at any time. But the English Wikpedia editors and administrators who truly care about the governance of this project have spoken, and have spoken quite clearly. You need to do one of two things: Either come up with a RADICALLY DIFFERENT banner campaign that immediately creates a consensus in favor of your banners, or suspend your deceptive, unethical campaign on English Wikipedia for at least the next year. You can crank up your unethical ads on the French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese Wikpedias if you are determined to, and see how they react to your overreach. Stop lying about not advertising on Wikipedia when you advertise on Wikipedia every year. That is truly grotesque. The consensus among the active volunteer content creators who are dedicated to the future of this encyclopedia is that we are overwhelmingly fed up with your unethical overreach which enriches the careerists among you and disregards the unpaid volunteers who have literally created your prosperous lifestyles and your exceptionally generous annual incomes and fringe benefits. For the sake of all that is good and righteous, please speak with us frankly and responsively, instead of spouting condescending PR agent talking points. Many of us have spent years or decades blocking PR people, and we place a very high priority on frank speech instead of baffelgab. Do not treat us like we just fell off a turnip truck. Cullen328 ( talk) 07:15, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
… run our own banners along side the ones from WMF, asking people to NOT donate this year. Not an option I would actually encourage, just noting that if people are upset enough, it is an option. Blueboar ( talk) 02:06, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
"But even the most radical foundation that funds your start-up phase is going to want to rotate you out of its portfolio after a few years—that’s just how foundations work. If you didn’t use those few years to build an independent support base among the people you serve, then you’ll find yourself begging to an inevitably less-radical foundation—a foundation that will have all kinds of time-consuming questions and concerns about the best parts of your strategies and plans. The revolution will be funded—but by small donations that come from the people you serve or represent."
— Rules for Revolutionaries : How Big Organising Can Change Everything
I think that there are two issues blended together here. One is the broad general one that WMF has overall gone pretty badly astray. The other is the fundraising wording one. To me the latter has a simple fix. The banners HAVE given the (false) impression that that there is a threat to English Wikipedia's survival that needs money to resolve. Reword them to stop giving that impression. Sincerely, North8000 ( talk) 19:27, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
Between 29 November and 31 December the WMF will be running their English fundraising banners campaign (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, and US). Every year this results in a number of discussions objecting to certain aspects of the campaign but these discussions start too late to address any issues. This RfC, running before the campaign starts, is intended to prevent that from happening again.
The RfC started on 14 November when the WMF provides the banners they are planning and will run until 24 November (chosen so that if changes are required the WMF has time to implement them). On 24 November, the discussion will be hatted pending closure; closers are being pre-identified in order to facilitate a quick close.
Originally, the WMF were going to provide a complete listing of the banners they were going to run. This changed, and they only provided a sample on WPM.
In order to ensure that enough comment has been received that consensus is reached despite the shortened RfC period it has been listed prior to opening; editors who wished to be notified when it was opened put their name to the "Editors to notify" list, which was also pre-populated with editors who have participated in similar discussions
If there is a consensus that the banners are not appropriate to run but the WMF tries to run them without implementing the required changes then our proposed method to enforce the consensus is for Common.css to be modified to prevent them from appearing.
Editors to notify
|
---|
This list consists of editors who have added their name, or have participated in related discussions ( Review of English Wikimedia fundraising emails, Wikimedia Foundation English fundraising campaign - October pre-tests, and Wikipedia Signpost/2022-06-26/Special report). Please raise any issues with the list on the talk page.
|
Some of the banners tested between September and November are available below; they may be indicative of the final banners.
Banners
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The following banners ran between 2022-11-18 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-11-21 21:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 10% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-11-07 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-11-14 21:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 10% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-10-26 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-10-27 00:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 100% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-10-11 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-10-12 00:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 100% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-10-03 20:00 (UTC) and 2022-10-10 20:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 7% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-09-23 20:00 (UTC) and 2022-09-25 20:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 10% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
|
So, the RfC is about to conclude, and if there isn't a sudden switch of positions among non-WMF affiliated commenters, it will result in clear opposition to the banners. Then what? Asking the WMF to delay the fundraising or skip a year on enwiki seem extremely unlikely to have any chance of success. If people want to pursue that angle, feel free of course, but I think we should decide on what action to take otherwise.
Thr main possibilities seem to be either hiding the banners somehow, or adding our own banners above or below with the vision of this RfC about the "official" banners. Both may lead to WMF intervention (on a technical level and against people attempting to implement the RfC results), but that would be an extremely unwise move from the WMF judging from previous such incidents.
Thoughts? Fram ( talk) 13:00, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I think a lot of the objections miss the mark. I completely agree that it is not really ok to have banners suggesting that donations go exclusively to en.wp, when we all know that is for sure not the case, by a fairly wide margin. That should change, and I hope the office is hearing that from the community. What is not reasonable is asking a nonprofit organization to just skip a fundraising cycle. Like it or not, the WMF owns Wikipedia, and donations are what funds everything the foundation does. We can't make them just not do it, and we should not be trying to do that, or quibbling about what the banners look like, or anything other than the actual core issue, that the banners are not honest or clear about what the donations are actually for. Fundraising should always be as transparent as possible and I don't see how it is a negative to emphasize the global nature of this movement. Beeblebrox ( talk) 00:31, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
What is not reasonable is asking a nonprofit organization to just skip a fundraising cycle.Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 00:33, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
$('.frb-conversation')[0].innerHTML = $('.frb-conversation')[0].innerHTML.replace(/Wikipedia/g, 'Wikimedia')
Yngvadottir ( talk) 02:04, 25 November 2022 (UTC)We, the editors of the English-language Wikipedia, do not endorse the below/above banner. [link is to this RfC as closed by Joe Roe] The Wikimedia foundation has an endowment in excess of $X and only Y% of its spending in the last fiscal year was in support of Wikipedia and the other projects. Please see details [HERE] [link to an information page with links to WMF financial statements and explanation of items such as chapter support]. You may also wish to create an account, which does not entail identifying yourself and makes it possible to hide some of these banners.
I seem to have missed the opportunity to comment on the fundraising banner dispute above, but I am concerned about how things may evolve from this point, so it might be worth proposing a more concrete outcome, realizing that I may be out-of-time or out-of-scope for the current RfC, but I'll give it a try. Please pardon unaccustomed brevity from me, but I'm typing in a mobile on (US) Thanksgiving Day. But how about something like this:
1. For 2022, recognizing the current time constraints, the WMF will modify the banners to be used on En-WP in a good-faith effort to address the concerns discussed above about the accuracy of their contents. The En-WP community will allow those banners to appear this year.
2. For 2023 and subsequent years, the WMF will post the proposed text of the year's banners on-wiki each year by June 1 (about six months before the start of the banner campaign) to allow for an unhurried discussion with the goal of reaching consensus each year on wording that satisfies both the WMF's goals and the En-WP community concerns.
Thoughts? Regards to all, Newyorkbrad ( talk) 19:51, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
Hello again. Thank you all for the constructive comments here, which I took to the Wikimedia Foundation Trustees in a meeting the Board held yesterday along with staff. What the Board and staff have heard is quite clear, here and elsewhere: the Wikimedia Foundation should change the fundraising messaging to take into account more direct community and readers’ input.
Depending on the outcome of the RfC closure, hopefully the changes can be done by next Tuesday for the English campaign. The content the fundraising team would run next Tuesday will be based on the comments and ideas collected in this RfC, Meta, and other avenues. That draft messaging is being worked on and will be shared by the team tomorrow for further improvement. During the next year the team will develop a better process for this globally as there is quite a lot of detail to figure out.
More to the point, it is time for a reset between the Foundation and our communities on the seemingly intractable issues that we have been discussing for many years. Maryana will share more with you soon about the budget impacts of the changes in the fundraising approach, as well as the other concerns raised here (and elsewhere) about the direction of the Wikimedia Foundation -- NTymkiv (WMF) ( talk) 18:14, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
@ Shani (WMF): and @ Laurentius, Pundit, Victoria, NTymkiv (WMF), Lgruwell-WMF, and Phoebe: 1,344 words to tell us that nothing is really going to change any time soon other than instead of spending more money on the communities' concerns, the WMF is actually scaling back. But they are making cuts on precisely the areas where the volunteers need support rather than reducing the money the WMF spends on itself and its junkets and non-encyclopedic ventures.
What's the point of the CAC if the board simply always sides with the WMF and states that community concerns "are not within our remit" ? With such a statement the board has accurately shot itself in the foot and anything they say now is merely thin attempts at saving face. In contrast, it will lead to the action that the English Wikipedia editors are proposing here. Contrary to what the communities used to believe, the BoT is not a watchdog, and between the board and the WMF it's not even clear which tail is wagging which dog. Community members who are elected to the board usually get thrown off it for doing their job and exposing scandals of the highest order. Whoever, or whatever process appoints the CEOs doesn't have a history of making the best decisions - it's even rumoured now that the last CEO was actually 'asked' to leave.
Community-WMF tension is nothing new but this time it's reached it peak and everything is boiling over; comments from the WMF or the board might be in good faith but they are just fuelling the fire instead of directly and pro-actively addressing the issues. Either withdraw these intended banners or reap the consequences. This should be compulsory reading for you all, but will you click the link? Will you finally understand those wise tabulated concerns from yet another disenchanted volunteer who is slaving away at doing the Foundation's work for free? Work that is directly concerned with Wikipedia's increasingly fragile reputation for neutrality and accuracy. What is the WMF going to do about it if the community does indeed proceed with its threatened civil disobedience and block the banners? Fire all the volunteers? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 02:52, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
I am writing on behalf of the fundraising team, who have been taking in all the comments and ideas shared on this RfC and in other channels. It is clear there is a lot of care and passion for our projects and how we ask our readers to support them. Thank you. The team continues to welcome participation to improve messaging, and we’ll think more deeply about ways to improve the collaboration channels for future campaigns.
In response to this conversation, the team has created a new page where we can collaborate on messages. Jimmy is already there writing new banners based on testing over the past weekend and the discussion on the RfC. We ask for your help and ideas on how we can improve them together. Please join him! Thank you for helping create the campaign this year. MeganHernandez (WMF) ( talk) 10:08, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The initial scope of this RfC was the content of the banners, but it quickly went beyond that scope to include other issues with the banners and issues with our relationship with the WMF in general. This expanded scope remains unresolved and we now need to determine how to address those issues.
In regards to the banners, I believe that the process is relatively straightforward with three outstanding questions:
There is no time to address these questions prior to the December campaign - although I hope the WMF will consider and address on its own initiative the concerns raised - so we can instead hold a full RfC at a time convenient to us on them.
Addressing our relationship with the WMF is more complicated and I believe we need to work out our own idealized image of our relationship with the WMF before we can do so; we can then use this idealized image to sit down with the WMF and attempt to come to a compromise that will satisfy both of us. Determining this idealized relationship would itself be a multistep process; I believe we should start by having general discussions on the following topics:
Finally, I think we need a discussion on WP:CONEXCEPT and whether we can block fundraising banners to force the WMF to come to the table at times where we believe they are being obstinate to the detriment of Wikipedia and our mission. My reading of this discussion is that there would be a consensus, but I believe that formally establishing that, as well as establishing requirements for when we can use such a tool, would be beneficial. BilledMammal ( talk) 03:15, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The following banner wording is currently running in the UK (highlight emphasis mine):
To all our readers in the UK, Please don't skip this 1 minute read. This Monday December 5th, we’re asking for your support. We are the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and 12 other free knowledge projects. If you can this year, please join the 2% of readers who give. Now is the time we invite you to give £2 or whatever seems right. Wikipedia is different. No advertising, no subscription fees, no paywalls. Those don't belong here. Wikipedia is a place to learn, free from bias or agenda. Together, let's preserve this special space. If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, please support the technology that makes our projects possible and advance the cause of free knowledge worldwide. Show the world that access to independent and unbiased information matters to you. — The Wikimedia Foundation
To me, the highlighted passage seems to fall foul of the RfC outcome logged above that banners that state or imply any of the following are not considered appropriate on the English Wikipedia:
I've started a section at Wikipedia:Fundraising/2022 banners#"Together, let's preserve this special space" (current banner wording) to discuss this wording. -- Andreas JN 466 23:44, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
Nearly all participants agreed that the banner texts are at least partly untruthful, and that soliciting money by misleading readers is an unethical and inappropriate use of this project. Specifically, participants clearly identified that banners that state or imply any of the following are not considered appropriate on the English Wikipedia:
A significant minority of participants objected to running banner campaigns at all. In my view this is beyond the scope of this RfC – arguably out of the scope of local discussions on this project entirely. Similarly, there was substantial discussion of the WMF's fundraising model and financing in general which, as several participants noted, is probably better taken up in other venues (e.g. Meta). In any case, no consensus was reached on these issues.
Few participants explicitly supported the banners. Many of those that did acknowledged the problems summarised above, but concluded that the banners were acceptable because they were effective (at raising money), comparable to similar campaigns by other organisations, and/or are an improvement over the WMF's compaigns in previous years. A number of members of WMF staff and the WMF Board of Trustees were amongst the most vocal in support of the banners. It is worth noting that, though their participation is welcome as anyone else's, it also carries no more weight than anyone else's. Their comments (understandably) tended to focus on the potential ramifications that changes to fundraising on the English Wikipedia, which constitutes a significant portion of the Foundation's income, could have on the rest of the movement. Like critical comments from opposers on movement finances in general, I considered this discussion largely irrelevent in assessing consensus on the questions posed by this RfC. To the extent that they engaged with the specific objections summarised above, a number of supporters, including several Board members, acknowledged that there were problems with the fundraising text that the WMF has placed on the English Wikipedia, though they disagreed on whether this is a fit topic for discussion on this project.
There was also significant discussion of how this consensus should be enforced, if the WMF chooses not to modify the banners before running them. This is a fraught topic given that our policies state that authorised acts of the WMF Board take precedence over consensus on this project, but that attempts to actually apply this principle have historically proved controversial. No consensus was reached on this issue, which is also strictly speaking outside the scope of this RfC. But taking off my closer's hat for a moment, I would like stress that this needn't come up – the preferred outcome for almost all participants, I believe, is that the English Wikipedia community and relevant WMF staff can come to an agreement on the content of fundraising banners.
– Joe ( talk) 12:22, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
Are the WMF's banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign appropriate? If they are not, what changes need to be made before the campaign can start?
Note that due to the WMF not providing a complete listing only four examples are available; a sampling of banners run by the WMF between September and November 2022 may be indicative of what content the other banners will contain. 05:47, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Name | Banner | Sticky Banner |
---|---|---|
Desktop large | To all our readers in Country, |
If Wikipedia has given you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate. |
Desktop small | We ask you, humbly: don't scroll away. |
This isn't a paywall |
Mobile large | To all our readers, |
None |
Mobile small | Hi. This isn’t the first time we’ve interrupted you recently, but only 2% of our readers give. This Day we humbly ask you to help sustain Wikipedia. We don't run ads, and we never have. All we ask is $2.75 if you can afford $2.75, or $25 if you can afford $25. Please don’t scroll away. |
Please, don’t ignore this message: be the rare exception who gives us $2.75. |
See below for comment from the WMF.
If opposing, please specify what changes need to be made to the banners before the campaign can start.
If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this Tuesday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. The price of a cup of coffee is all we need.This is a lie. If every reader donated just $2.75 then next year we'd see a banner saying "If every person reading this donated just $5.50, our fundraising campaign would be over". It is already true from a financial perspective that
Wikipedia could keep thriving for yearsif the WMF's money was decimated (literally, divided by 10). These banners provably guilt people into donating money they would be better off keeping for their own living costs. The English Wikipedia serves a large number of readers worldwide, many of whom live in countries where incomes are much smaller than the U.S. Even for donations within the U.S. and similar countries, many readers are pressured to give more than they should. Read Thomas' comment here: meta:Talk:Fundraising/Archive_6#Shame_on_you_WMF!_Shame! I have heard from those that run OTRS that these messages are commonplace, though Thomas' was a rare on-wiki one. More fundamentally, the nature of banners asking readers to donate misinforms them about how they can support Wikipedia. We have a crisis of lack of admins. We have a crisis of small bus factors in areas from NPP to bot maintenance. We have a crisis of editor retention. The principal way that a reader can support a wiki is by editing. Where are the editor recruitment banners? With our numbers in decline and malicious agents ( UPE) on the rise, there has never been a more harmful time for our website to seemingly promote donation of money as the primary way in which readers can support Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation has exceeded its Endowment target. Why are they actively fundraising? What is the target amount for the current fundraising period, which group of volunteers has undersigned the target, and when will the fundraising end? Until the en.wiki community actively endorse the WMF's fundraising target, there should be no banners on our website. — Bilorv ( talk) 22:48, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
humbly ask you to protect Wikipedia,
please take a minute to secure [Wikipedia's] future by making a donation,
This day we ask you to help us sustain Wikipedia). The sample banners also present worse examples of this, like
humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia’s independence.
A similar issue is with the implication in some banners that Wikipedia might need to resort to advertising or a subscription service to remain online if donations fall. This can be seen prominently in the sample banners which say things like We don’t charge a subscription fee, and Wikipedia is sustained by the donations of only 2% of our readers. Without reader contributions, big or small, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.
, but it can also be seen in the example banners which say We don't run ads, and we never have ... Without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.
I also oppose the section on Here’s what your donation enables:
; given the issues we have had receiving support from the WMF in key areas such as New Page Patrol and
WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU it seems dishonest to place so much focus on improvements the WMF make to Wikipedia and the support the WMF provides for volunteers.
The banners should also make clear the distinction between the WMF and Wikipedia; one of the sample banners did this (we humbly ask you to support the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.
), and I believe all banners should do the same.
Finally, the WMF said that in response to editor concerns they no longer use the term 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way
. As such, it is disappointing that they continue to use phrase 98% of our readers don't give; they keep reading
, which is functionally identical.
BilledMammal (
talk) 22:55, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
t
c
23:21, 14 November 2022 (UTC)Elon can't buy this. Give us $2 so it stays that way.Levivich ( talk) 06:48, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
We ran the banners for 4 days towards the end of the campaign, and the overall result of the new banner was a 65% decrease in donations.and
this exact message won't reach the revenue target for the year. Although WMF did state that
there are interesting concepts to further develop, this is insane. The body owning Wikipedia values adding even more money to their piggy bank over truth. Dialmayo ( talk) ( Contribs) she/her 16:22, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Here's what your donation enables: ... Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day– what? Writers here don't get any money.) BeanieFan11 ( talk) 21:37, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every dayis revealing: the WMF's monetary support for volunteers is limited to choosing a favored few to give tickets to junkets, and to underwriting regional associations who see the WMF as presiding over the projects rather than supporting them. The WMF shouldn't be fundraising to finance editors, doesn't need to fundraise any further to do its job, and is asking for money yet again in ways that show it's lost sight of its role, or, worse, seeks to mislead peopleso it can do things other than what they believe they are donating for. Yngvadottir ( talk) 11:12, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
humbly ask you to support Wikipedia's independence.Giving money to the WMF is not supporting Wikipedia's independence. Arguably it's doing the opposite. This RfC speaks loud and clear to the Foundation's Board that the English Wikipedia community is independent. I support a short-term, first-time block on the fundraising banners (12 to 24 hours) as a behavioral sanction on the Foundation. This block must be allowed to stand in order to re-establish or reconfirm the independence of the English Wikipedia editing community. If the Foundation prevents or reverts such a block before it's run its course that would signal and establish that the English Wikipedia community is not an independent equal of the Foundation (separation of powers) but rather is subservient to the Foundation. I'm more concerned about the Foundation's independence than Wikipedia's. The more influential Wikipedia becomes, thanks to Google, Alexa and Siri, and the larger the pot of cash under Foundation stewardship grows, the more vulnerable the Foundation becomes. What's stopping some billionaire like Elon Musk from bribing 50% + 1 of the Board members with cash (say $100 million each) in return for nominating Elon's picks to the board and then resigning their seats? wbm1058 ( talk) 15:02, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
try and optimize for showing the least number of banners per reader to hit the budget; the number of banners per reader has remained constant at 10, and the duration of the campaign has been slowly growing, from 31 days in 2020 to 33 days in 2022. I'm also not convinced that they stop when they reach the budget; when was the last time the campaign was terminated before it reached its scheduled end date?
t
c
23:03, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
in my case I've specifically done fundraising as a job at the WMF in the past). Should WMF employees who chose to !vote in this discussion clearly disclose their conflict of interest, or do the unique circumstances of this discussion make it appropriate to not do so? BilledMammal ( talk) 23:50, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
Wikipedia … is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. Wikipedia is maintained by a nonprofit … Without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.I understand that lay readers may perhaps be better served by a simpler, more idealized view of Wikipedia's workings; nevertheless, this phraseology discomforts me slightly. The choice of libraries and public parks as a simile is (if I may speculate slightly) perhaps indicative of a cathedral mentality on the WMF's part: both examples are maintained by a centralized group of custodians or stewards, who provide a service for the public to see and use but not to touch (i.e., alter). Off the top of my head, I can't think of a better, more volunteer-focused analogy; perhaps a blood bank? I also don't quite like the words "maintained" and "run"; they carry the connotation that the WMF is directly involved in writing and editing the encyclopedia, which is a slight misconception. Perhaps "hosted" and "support", respectively, would be better word choices. In another banner, it's claimed that one's
donation enables: Improvements on Wikipedia and our other online free knowledge projects [and] Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day.It's technically true, perhaps, but I think it's stated a bit too strongly, implying (incorrectly) that the WMF is directly involved (to any significant degree) in the everyday affairs of the encyclopedia.Of course, there are probably more salient issues than my rhetorical quibble: the size of the WMF's piggy bank, the way it's publicly portrayed, its intransparency, etc. Perhaps others more knowledgeable than me can address those concerns. Shells-shells ( talk) 00:06, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
t
c
08:23, 15 November 2022 (UTC)the rate of growth seen in past years will not continue in the 2022−2023 fiscal year as we stabilize our growth and also ensure that new resources are delivering maximum impact for our mission? BilledMammal ( talk) 11:32, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Wakelamp d[@-@]b ( talk) 06:12, 23 November 2022 (UTC)"... the community considered 13 proposals for fixing perceived flaws in NSPORTS. A fundamental problem was that, by the time these proposals were made, most editors had lost interest. For example, the main proposal had over 100 editors weigh-in, but of the 13 other proposals, only two got over 65 participants, and most struggled to get even half the participation of the main proposal. While proposals with 50 participants could achieve consensus, editors tended to be evenly split on most questions."
t
c
08:04, 15 November 2022 (UTC)For example, we have held two events in the last two weeks where senior staff and board members made presentations and directly answered questions from donors.Are these presentations and QA sessions open to all donors, or only major donors? BilledMammal ( talk) 09:29, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
via Endowment | via WP | |
---|---|---|
Transaction fee | 0.35 | 0.35 |
Bank processing fees | 0.10 | 0.10 |
Donation Admin, IT, analystics, PR | 2.00 | 2.00 |
WMF Admin and grants | 2.00 | |
Management, bonuses,and in kind | 1.00 | |
WMF endowment | 1.00 | |
Tides endowment | 1.00 | |
Tides grant transaction | 2.00 | |
Grantee admin | 0.35 | |
Beneficiary | 3.20 | |
enWP, Wiktionary, Wikinews etc. Commons, Servers, and any dev requested by Wikis | 2.00 | |
Other servers/translation | 1.55 | |
Wikimania and Country chapters | 1.00 | |
Total | 10.00 | 10.00 |
The data in this table looks very different than anything I have ever seen. Do you mind including the source? I can direct you to a third-party source that reviews our financial information, Charity Navigator. They publish a three-year average of WMF's financials in three categories: Fundraising (which includes payment processing fees, fundraising staff, our fundraising technical infrastructure, events, mailings, etc.) is 11.5 percent of our expenses. Administration (Finance, legal, HR, governance, etc.) is 13.8 percent of our expenses. Programmatic work (technology, product, grants to affiliates, etc. is 74.5 percent of our expenses. This ratio of programmatic expenses to administration and fundraising expenses is considered good enough for us to receive Charity Navigator's highest rating. Lgruwell-WMF ( talk) 22:38, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I hope someone is listening: If you mean us, we all are - very intently. If you mean the WMF, well it would appear that they only scan the comments and very superficially. This goes not only for @ Seddon, JBrungs (WMF), JVillagomez (WMF), MeganHernandez (WMF), RAdimer-WMF, and KStineRowe (WMF): and the rest of the 26 employees of the fundraising team, but also for all the staff in Product and Engineering. We have forced the WMF into according us a video conference with them, but the very main objective of the exercise has been met with basically a 'not enough money'. The question therefore remains: What does the WMF actually do with it's glut of funds from the donations that the volunteers' work brings in? They might be giving it away to other charities or hiring their friends as consultants. These are the details that are not revealed in their so-called transparency.
"Salaries and wages" includes salary, benefits, retirement, wellness, and payroll taxes for full-time and part-time staff members in the US and outside of the US employed by Wikimedia Foundation or its Employer of Record.Staff outside the US employed via an Employer of Record are are a class of contractor whose pay is (I am not an accountant) reported on the Form 990 under salaries and wages. Seddon talk 21:07, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Expenses incurred for services provided in the United States (for example [...] services provided over the Internet) that include recipients both inside and outside the United States shouldn't be reported in Part I.Seddon talk 02:35, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
I think it's vital that we focus our critiques and energies on the organisation and its practices. These question have been side stepped, and I still strongly condemn both the tone of these banners and their use on this Wikipedia. Let's get on with it and do what has to be done: either the WMF withdraws them, or have them locally banned. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:48, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
One "easy" thing to get started would be to allocate 5% of the WMF's budget to something like the "community tech wishlist". Yes. Something like this is needed (exact percentage can be worked out later). Community tech/the Wishlist is the volunteer's main way of requesting software, and it seems like this is understaffed. We are a rich organization, but as volunteers, sometimes it doesn't feel like that wealth is shared with us in tangible ways, e.g. fulfilling our software requests in a timely manner. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 02:02, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
43 percent - direct support to websites (engineering improvements, design, legal support) 33 percent - support to the volunteer community through grants, programs, training, tools, advocacy, and other support 24 percent - other (14 percent on administration and governance, 10 percent on fundraising)
t
c
16:29, 21 November 2022 (UTC)From 18 November to 20 November, the WMF is planning to run a low level banner test as the final test before the campaign is scheduled to be launched on 29 November. Based on the overwhelming response in opposition here I've asked them to cancel that planned test. BilledMammal ( talk) 02:44, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
making edits with which they do not actually agree) BilledMammal ( talk) 03:57, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest reframing this discussion. The decision to halt WMF fundraising is a drastic step, but there's clearly growing support for it. Regardless of whether this represents a minority in the grand scheme of the English Wikipedia community, there don't appear to be many willing to jump in the line of fire in defending the fundraising, so canceling the banners (or a very ugly conflict) is a real possibility. I still say the main reason we're here is because of widespread hurt and resentment towards how the foundation has been run (and specifically how money is spent). There will be a few people who say "no banners no matter what" or "burn it to the ground", but that is an extreme position. For most of us, I suspect it's entirely possible the WMF could change how it does things enough that fundraising would return to being an infrequent annoyance (like all fundraising) rather than a reminder of the distance between the volunteers and the foundation.
Throughout this discussion, some people are offering concrete suggestions, but the suggestions vary by person, and are all undercut by the number of people who'd sooner write "WMF sucks, don't donate" than have any fundraising. That's in part because of how this RfC is framed: it's only about a yes/no to fundraising banners, without any attempt to turn it into something that actually benefits the community (except insofar as not running banners benefits the community). Meanwhile, we're coming up on the time when the banners run, and a sizable staff has to scramble to figure out how to interpret the opinions and emotions expressed here in a short window of time (it would be entirely valid to point out that people have been raising these issues for some time, however, so they should've been able to see this coming).
We've made it clear there's a lot of hurt here, and that there are a lot of people willing to take drastic measures because of it. Rather than just decide to obstruct fundraising, however, let's shift conversation to conditions to continue.
I still believe that most of the people who are upset about the banners wouldn't be so upset if they didn't have such a problem with how the foundation allocates its money. That makes me wonder what sort of change in the WMF budget would be enough. Above I made one suggestion. What if the WMF guaranteed that 5% of its annual budget for the next five years would be dedicated to community-selected projects (call it an expansions of the community tech wishlist or something else, but it would be entirely for tasks selected by the community and carried out by WMF staff, without the need for a grants process and without the need for volunteers to do the labor of management, hiring, etc.)? Think of all that could do for us (not to mention readers). Of course, they can't implement that in a matter of a couple weeks, but it's not impossible for them (the board, I suppose) to make that decision. If bureaucracy moves too slowly, we could also say "this is the last time you get to run fundraising until you do this" (which gives them more time to figure things out without jacking things up in the short-term). Thoughts? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:42, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
they approve it and then they never do it- the point here is that there are people on-wiki willing to put a stop to on-wiki fundraising efforts. They could theoretically also implement something like superprotection to force the banners through, too, but why would you get into such a massive, damaging conflict with the volunteers when you can allocate a piece of the budget to something they want instead? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:55, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
Dear all,
I would like to give you some more background and information on the fundraising banners. I have shared the latest banners that we are using for the banner pre-tests leading up to the English campaign to non-logged-in users. As our campaigns are built on continuous iteration and improvement, the team will continue to incorporate your feedback and ideas into our testing in the next few weeks, as well as daily iteration throughout the campaign.
Over the last year, some editors have provided feedback on messaging they would like to see changed in banners. Some of those changes we have already made and are listed below. The team combines feedback from editors, along with feedback from readers and donors, to shape our campaigns.
Example current message (this is our Desktop Large message which is shown once to non-logged in users, then smaller banners afterwards):
To all our readers in the U.S., Please don’t scroll past this. This Monday, for the 1st time recently, we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to support Wikipedia’s independence. Only 2% of our readers give. Many think they’ll give later, but then forget. If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this Monday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. We don't run ads, and we never have. We rely on our readers for support. We serve millions of people, but we run on a fraction of what other top sites spend. Wikipedia is special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. We ask you, humbly: please don’t scroll away. If Wikipedia has given you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate. Show the world that access to neutral information matters to you. Thank you.
Example current message (this is our Mobile Large message which is shown once to non-logged in users, then smaller banners afterwards):
To all our readers,
Please don’t scroll past this. This Monday, for the 1st time recently, we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to support Wikipedia’s independence. Only 2% of our readers give. Many think they’ll give later, but then forget. If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this Monday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. The price of a cup of coffee is all we need.
We don't run ads, and we never have. We rely on our readers for support. We serve millions of people, but we run on a fraction of what other top sites spend.
Wikipedia is special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. Wikipedia is maintained by a nonprofit, and the 58 million articles that compose it are free. Without reader contributions, we couldn’t run Wikipedia the way we do.
We want to make sure everyone on the planet has equal access to knowledge. We still have work to do.
If Wikipedia provided you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, please take a minute to secure its future by making a donation. Thank you.
You can compare this most recent banner to the banner that was used in December 2021.
Here are examples of messages the team is currently working on. We would appreciate feedback on our meta page around these ideas and welcome more ideas we can try in the upcoming campaign:
In the past year, the fundraising team has made the following changes to campaigns in direct response to volunteer feedback. We are grateful for the input and partnership with volunteers in improving campaigns for readers.
In the creative process, the team uses feedback from readers, donors, and volunteers to generate new messages that will resonate with our audiences. We are always looking for new language suggestions to reach our readers to help them learn more about Wikipedia while we ask for their support. For example, the Dutch community recently wrote a fully original banner that the team tested during the Dutch campaign in September. We ran the banners for 4 days towards the end of the campaign, and the overall result of the new banner was a 65% decrease in donations. While this exact message won't reach the revenue target for the year, there are interesting concepts to further develop. We followed up on this test with a productive conversation with the community after the campaign, and we are planning to work together on incorporating more of the ideas from that session into future banners for the Netherlands.
As the team is actively preparing the upcoming End of Year campaign and developing new messaging, we would greatly appreciate constructive feedback and ideas for ways we can reach our donors while raising the revenue target this year. If you have messaging ideas you would like to see tested, please share them with Julia or leave a message here or on our meta talk page. We will be here, reading and listening to the discussion. The work of the global community of editors makes Wikipedia a useful resource for readers. We thank you for your work and welcome your input on the fundraising campaign.
Thank you.
Posting on behalf of JBrungs, RAdimer-WMF ( talk) 23:09, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
@ JBrungs (WMF) and RAdimer-WMF: so, with all that extra money coming in, why were the WMF planning on reducing the Community Wishlist Survey from once every year to once every two years, instead of increasing the size of the team working on these long-neglected wishes? Why should we take any statement above (or in the banners) about supporting Wikipedia and its volunteers serious when in reality community wishes are neglected and underfunded, volunteer created improvements and patches are being stalled, and critical voices at technical places (like Phabricator) are being brutally silenced? Fram ( talk) 09:19, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
Why do we need to vote again? Just keep working on the wishes from the last survey? What other ideas besides moving to an every other year format did the Community Wishlist team consider? The goal of "we would like to spend more time working on projects and less administering the wishlist process" feels reasonable to me but gosh does that announcement and frankly your response here feel tone deaf to me which is not something I associate with your work.
Either way, the team is gratified to know that people appreciate our work, and our commitment to working on projects that are important to the community is unchanged.feels like something you say internally so that the people on the team aren't upset by the negative reaction to this announcement. I think several Wikipedians have failed at basic decency towards WMF staff in this discussion and so I understand your choice to jump into this discussion and how that speaks well of you as a colleague. But as a manager whose responsibilities are to work with the community, I hope you can see the community's desire to increase the budget of this area - which is congruent with the way funds have been raised in the past - not to make a more efficient use of the moneys and would communicate with us accordingly. Best. Barkeep49 ( talk) 06:44, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
I think several Wikipedians have failed at basic decency towards WMF staff in this discussion- I'm not one of those people who look under every rock to see if there is an excuse for claiming PA, but I can take the hint while AGF is not a suicide pact; to be quite blunt however, it's no more than how a manager in a company would address the staff if they were not quite doing the right thing for the major stakeholders], and we volunteers - major stakeholders - have no other way of hauling the staff into the office and give them a dressing down. What happens in reality however, is that those of the staff who happen to be admins (and possibly other admins) threaten the volunteers with sanctions for speaking up–the volunteers have no trade union or employment laws on their side.
"Either way, the team is gratified to know that people appreciate our work, and our commitment to working on projects that are important to the community is unchanged"are purely patronising, just like the way the BoT talks to us as if we were naughty children asking for too much candy (video evidence exists). It's all enough to make the most dedicated volunteers give up, and what with local governance quirks on top of it, some do.
Hello all. Please find below an official response from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
This movement is built on back-and-forth debate, even when people have strong views and deeply disagree. The Wikimedia Foundation Board acknowledges and respects the mechanisms built by Wikipedia communities to raise issues of concern through the use of RfCs. That said, we are clear that an RfC on English Wikipedia is not the best way to determine the use of global resources that support many other communities who are not present in this RfC discussion, but who would be impacted by it. A forthcoming movement charter may help, but is unlikely to solve the issues being raised right now.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board has been closely watching this RfC since it began last week. Some very reasonable requests to have input into wording of the banners have been raised on this page, along with other overall concerns and questions about fundraising and spending. These are not taken by us lightly, and we have asked Foundation leadership to help us address them while working with the communities over the course of the next year. I would like to share some thoughts as Board Chair, and I have asked a few other Trustees to add their input here as well.
This RfC was started to discuss banners running on English Wikipedia. However, the revenue we raise from this fundraising campaign supports a global technology infrastructure and community needs around the world. Banners on English Wikipedia provide Wikimedia with our largest revenue source. They are one of the reasons we have been able to maintain an ad-free platform, and support work in other regions of the world. They are also consistent with our mission, allowing users to choose to give or not, and protecting our independence. It is therefore clear to the Board that banners need to continue as part of our global revenue strategy.
While this RfC started about banner messaging, the issues raised here cover a much wider scope. I have read the numerous questions about how we allocate our budget to support the mission, the calls for clarity about how we support volunteer needs, feelings of distrust and disconnect, and the desire for more input and collaboration on the work and priorities of the Foundation. As Board Chair and as a longtime Wikimedian, I am sorry that we have gotten to this point. This is a clear signal that we must work even more closely with the communities, including English Wikipedia editors, to identify more productive ways for us to rebuild trust.
In the immediate short term, this includes engaging with the communities on the messaging used in fundraising banners on the projects they contribute to. Of course, there would be reasonable limits on how the input would be implemented. Thank you to those who have already offered constructive suggestions for testing alternative messages for the fundraising team to test and implement over the past weekend.
It is also important to be realistic about what kinds of activities would be at risk if the movement were to stop raising funds from the English banner campaign, ranging from resources to improve our product and technology infrastructure, to grants supporting many other regions of the world, to legal support for community members in need (as a Ukrainian Wikipedian I can tell you that things like this sometimes literally mean a life-or-death situation), for trust and safety, as well as for translations and live interpretation for global communities – to name a few. A funding decrease of this size would impact not just English Wikipedia, but how the Foundation supports many other projects in our global movement.
The Board of Trustees, with the majority of its members selected by Wikimedia communities, is ultimately responsible for the Foundation's budget, its reserves, and how the money is raised. While we can agree that some of the issues raised in this RfC may be valid (and the associated frustration real and understandable), an RfC on a single wiki, is not the way to decide the financial fate of all Wikimedia sites and the movement.
To sum it up:
-- NTymkiv (WMF) ( talk) 18:08, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Reserves are not excess cash: they are money set aside to ensure that we can sustain our mission even in times of difficulty - either to weather the storm (in case of short-term problems) or to allow for some space to make more drastic changes (in case of long-term problems).I would argue that
times of difficultyinclude neglecting your largest stakeholder to the point that they are forced to take drastic action.
In my personal view, the discussion is partly about the division of labor and "ownership" of space. I generally understand that the community may not like some of the messaging. Still, I don't think it is practical or reasonable to assume that the community can have a final say on how fundraising is done through banners - it is, and it should be done by professionals. It is thanks to these professionals that the campaigns last shorter, only as long as they need to run to collect the annual target. To use an analogy: we should not have an RfC about what servers software should we install - while we all have opinions, the bigger picture has to be that some of these decisions need to be left in the hands of staff. Ultimately, I also don't feel that this RfC is ONLY about the current content of some banners.
In a broader perspective, I do not think that English Wikipedia community should be making decisions massively affecting all Wikimedia community. While the banners are indeed shown on English Wikipedia, the revenue they generate supports smaller language communities. Overall, I’m inclined to say that the community as a whole (but not just one language community) should have an opportunity to express objections to some specific wording in our banners if need be, and it is the role of the WMF to hear it and take it into account, meaningfully (but not automatically or blindly), as banner effectiveness obviously cannot be the only criterion. Nevertheless, the community (and especially, just one language community, major as it may be) cannot object to banners as a whole and question the WMF fundraising base model. Pundit| utter 18:23, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
here the argument of one community versus 300 stays quite strongI don’t believe that is a strong argument; I see it as closely related to the suggestion that land votes.
I see many comments on this page about the Foundation's cash reserves and the idea that if we were to stop banner fundraising this year, there would be very little impact to Foundation work because of the ability to dip into those reserves. Reserves are not excess cash: they are money set aside to ensure that we can sustain our mission even in times of difficulty - either to weather the storm (in case of short-term problems) or to allow for some space to make more drastic changes (in case of long-term problems). This feels particularly important as we anticipate another global recession. Earlier this year the Board passed a resolution to create a formal policy for the Foundation to keep between 12-18 months of revenue in reserve (with a target of 18 months). This is aligned with best practices: for instance, according to Charity Navigator (which assesses nonprofits in the US) an organization should have at least 12 months of reserves. The Wikimedia Foundation is currently at approximately 17 months of reserves; they are projected to slightly decrease in the next couple of years, but always staying within that range. If they were to approach 12 months, the Wikimedia Foundation would have to take actions to increase them. Failing to do so would not meet the Wikimedia Foundation responsibility towards the movement. - Laurentius ( talk) 18:31, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation financials, for reference:
Year | Source | Revenue | Expenses | Asset rise | Net assets at end of year |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2021/2022 | $154,686,521 | $145,970,915 | $8,173,996 | $239,351,532 | |
2020/2021 | $162,886,686 | $111,839,819 | $50,861,811 | $231,177,536 | |
2019/2020 | $129,234,327 | $112,489,397 | $14,674,300 | $180,315,725 | |
2018/2019 | $120,067,266 | $91,414,010 | $30,691,855 | $165,641,425 | |
2017/2018 | $104,505,783 | $81,442,265 | $21,619,373 | $134,949,570 | |
2016/2017 | $91,242,418 | $69,136,758 | $21,547,402 | $113,330,197 | |
2015/2016 | $81,862,724 | $65,947,465 | $13,962,497 | $91,782,795 | |
2014/2015 | $75,797,223 | $52,596,782 | $24,345,277 | $77,820,298 | |
2013/2014 | $52,465,287 | $45,900,745 | $8,285,897 | $53,475,021 | |
2012/2013 | $48,635,408 | $35,704,796 | $10,260,066 | $45,189,124 | |
2011/2012 | $38,479,665 | $29,260,652 | $10,736,914 | $34,929,058 | |
2010/2011 | $24,785,092 | $17,889,794 | $9,649,413 | $24,192,144 | |
2009/2010 | $17,979,312 | $10,266,793 | $6,310,964 | $14,542,731 | |
2008/2009 | $8,658,006 | $5,617,236 | $3,053,599 | $8,231,767 | |
2007/2008 | $5,032,981 | $3,540,724 | $3,519,886 | $5,178,168 | |
2006/2007 | $2,734,909 | $2,077,843 | $654,066 | $1,658,282 | |
2005/2006 | $1,508,039 | $791,907 | $736,132 | $1,004,216 | |
2004/2005 | $379,088 | $177,670 | $211,418 | $268,084 | |
2003/2004 | $80,129 | $23,463 | $56,666 | $56,666 |
-- Andreas JN 466 13:19, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
I will keep this fairly brief, and at a high level of principles. I was happy to see a discussion of the specific content of the fundraising banners - I have not always been comfortable with the messaging in some of our past banners (though I'm very comfortable with some messages that at least some people are unhappy about - we can have a longer discussion about that) and I regard it as unfortunate that this RfC veered into a wide range of issues that are very much beyond the scope of that original discussion, and very much beyond the scope of what is suitable for an RfC in English language Wikipedia. We are a global movement with open community processes that are appropriate for that wider discussion, most notably the movement strategy process which resulted in a strategy that demands a level of spending that would be impossible if some of the comments in this RfC were pursued. I would suggest a reboot of that original mission (of examining the banners), and I encourage both the WMF fundraising staff and thoughtful community members to work together to find a way forward that meets our twin objectives of financial health and a trustworthy campaign for the necessary donations.
To say this a different way: the question "are these banners to be run in English appropriate" is a valid one for English Wikipedia, when undertaken in a thoughtful, positive, and collaborative way. Questions like "does the Foundation have too much money?" and "Should the Foundation be a minimalist stub organization spending just a couple million a year to keep the servers running?" are very very far outside the scope of an English Wikipedia RfC, and should be taken up in the right place.
On that latter, much more important question, it is my view that we should be ambitious in both our spending and our fundraising. We have an important goal: a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet, in their own language, and we have an enormous number of challenges to get there. I would personally like to see a significantly increased amount of spending on a variety of efforts to support the growth of Wikipedia in the smaller (for us) languages. To put this into context, today there are only 19 languages with at least 1 million articles, and even that is a generous count due to a few which have extensive low-quality bot translated content.
Certain people in the community like to post numbers in a very accusatory way that anyone serious should see are not proper subjects for accusations, but for praise. The Foundation has a healthy reserve, in line with best practices advocated by major nonprofit governance organizations. The Foundation continues to go from strength to strength in a world where our "competitors" in terms of other large popular Internet sites have much more. Just to give one contemporary example that is on many people's minds: twitter, a toxic cesspit which has done real damage to the world (my opinion, not NPOV!) had revenue last year of over $4.5 billion dollars. I think we should be proud that we are targeting $175 million in revenue by simply asking people for money, and that this money is being spent wisely and carefully - too carefully in my view, and we can discuss that, but what I mean it I would love to some some higher-risk pilot projects with serious funding to tackle community building in some of the largest languages in the world. Hindi, a very important language of India, has only 153,000 articles. If we could spend $20 million a year and jumpstart that growth to get them to a million articles (along with all the other languages of India) that would be amazing - and we are now in a position where such ambitious ideas can begin to take place with some $1-$2 million trials of reasonable ideas - some of which would fail.
In short - I want to see the WMF succeed financially and expand in ways that fulfill our mission. I want all of our banner ads to be honest and thoughtful... and successful.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 19:43, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
If we could spend $20 million a year and jumpstart that growth to get them to a million articles. I think one of the themes of the above discussion is that we feel that not enough money is being spent on things like community tech. It's really hard to get excited about things like an 8 figure risky expansion of another wiki, or knowledge equity grants, or the endowment, until we feel that our issues at home (e.g. community tech) are receiving proper funding.
are very very far outside the scope of an English Wikipedia RfC, and should be taken up in the right place.What is the proper channel? Perhaps the folks in this discussion are not aware of the proper channel, which is part of what has led to this disconnect between how WMF spends donation money, and how English Wikipedians expect WMF to spend donation money. Perhaps some of WMF's community relations folks need to publicize this a little better, for example with watchlist notices on key movement strategy votes. Thanks for listening. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 23:30, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
Having said that, I think everyone - especially sensible people like you - should make it very very clear that it would be absurd to get into some kind of wheel war here. Given that WP:WHEEL permits actions to be reinstated when there is a
clear discussion leading to a consensus decisionin support of the action the only potential wheel warring would be the WMF attempting to block efforts to block the banners. As such, I ask you to clarify this statement: will the WMF respect the result of this discussion, or will they wheel war in an attempt to ensure the banners are displayed? BilledMammal ( talk) 23:35, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
The productive thing coming out of this discussion is consensus to not run these banners. If the WMF does things the volunteer editors object to, they risk losing the volunteer editors. If it's one thing that platform operators have learned over the last 20 years, it's that userbases will move to a new platform given the right conditions. It happened to MySpace and Vine, it's happening to Twitter, and it can happen to the WMF, too. So sure, they legally own the domain name, but that's only as valuable as the volunteers who write the website. The volunteers are the ones with all the power and control, and when they all agree on something, they're pretty much unstoppable. Which is why all the high-ranking WMFers are commenting here: this is an existential crisis for them. If we run no banners this season, they may actually have to cut the budget and possibly reduce the size of the staff, or at least the reserves. And if they run it over objections, another high-profile dispute between the WMF and its own user base will also damage the WMF's reputation and thus its fundraising effectiveness. Levivich ( talk) 14:53, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
once we start calling things "existential crises" and predicting the downfall of Wikipedia...there's no impending doom coming to WikipediaI think you misread/misunderstood what I wrote. I wrote
Which is why all the high-ranking WMFers are commenting here: this is an existential crisis for them.Emphasis on for them, not for us. Not for Wikipedia, for the
high-ranking WMFers. To be clear, the "existential crisis" is that enwiki's users don't allow them to fundraise with banners on enwiki. It's "existential" because, as they themselves have admitted, the WMF absolutely depends on enwiki banners to bring in enough money to pay for the WMF. If we take that away, jobs may be lost at the WMF. Wikipedia, however, will carry on just fine, as you said. Levivich ( talk) 22:00, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
When I was just an editor, I realised that wikimedians tend to live in silos. Some are in one man (or woman) silos where they only edit and refuse to communicate; most of us are in a project silo where we are comfortable and don't want to look beyond it. While I have minor contributions to English Wikipedia, Commons and other projects, my silo was Russian Wikipedia.
The projects under the umbrella of the Russian Chapter are in an interesting position in the Movement, because WMF cannot run banners or fundraise in them otherwise. After all, the Russian government is hostile to what they call "foreign agents", especially those notoriously liberal as Wikipedia. So the Russian Chapter has to fundraise on its own. So why don't they fork, then? Maybe because They still use the servers maintained by WMF, which is especially important now when Russian Wikipedia is virtually the only independent news source not blocked by Putin. Rusian Government is trying to replace Wikipedia by launching their own projects, and they keep crashing because they need more people and infrastructure.
And talking about servers, this year WMF opened a second server centre in Marseille because the infamous Amsterdam one was groaning and sometimes buckling down under the strain of Europe, Africa and Asia requests.
When they were able, Russian wikimedians went to Wikimania and other conferences. For people in the Global North, Trust & Safety are the police that curtails their freedom. For Russian and Belarusian Wikipedians who are being hounded and jailed, T & S is a real help - but you know that I cannot go into the details. The Problem with WMF is that much work goes beyond the public eye.
Btw, when I talk about "Russian", I don't mean just the Russian language. Modern Russia is a former Empire, so the Russian Chapter helps projects in around 30 languages, from Chechen to Bashkir.
I hope you forgive me if I say that in this RfC, English Wikipedians are trying to remain in a silo. The oldest, biggest and arguably the best. But WMF banners not only fundraise for your infrastructure. The banners are a fundraiser for the Movement as a whole. If another global project, such as Commons or Wikidata, tries to do the same, the results will be laughable. Remember what comes with great power. Victoria ( talk) 09:10, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
But you realise that testing new concept banners takes time, we cannot change horses in midstream.Enwiki has been raising these objections for years, and if instead of listening and responding to them the WMF has ignored them and no longer has time to respond to them, then that is the WMF's problem to resolve. BilledMammal ( talk) 10:15, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
it's hard to do anything, because you cannot just pull a couple of lines of code and fix it, everything is interconnectedIt's not that bad, and I am a software engineer and used to be one for Wikimedia. In my view the problem has been management excessively focused on "new shiny" over maintenance, pressure to deliver the minimum viable prototype then move on to the next new shiny thing, forcing out of developers who a manager sees as in the way of their rise to power, and an increasing focus on US culture war issues. Anomie ⚔ 12:56, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
Each country has its own employment, pension, medical coverage laws.This part I know much less about, but doesn't WMF sidestep most of that by not technically "employing" anyone outside the US? Isn't everyone else (with maybe a few exceptions) considered a "contractor" either employed by an employer of record or operating under their country's version of "independent contractor" status? Or did that finally change in the last year or two? Anomie ⚔ 12:56, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
You also say that staff must ultimately be the ones in the charge...but why? The staff are those most qualified to judge what an effective banner will be. They have no more or less competence at judging the morality of any given banner than I do. They also will not have to deal with the negatives on-wiki and through VRT that any banner campaign, but especially fundraising campaigns bring. If you want a global RfC to occur on the matter rather than local, I'd suggest that be unwise or it would require the removal of banners from local communities that otherwise backed their presence if the global majority disagreed.Best, Barkeep49 ( talk) 04:39, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
it would create a super expensive and, likely, highly ineffective system: Our current fundraising system costs $17.5 million (according to the CFO's comment here)... isn't that already super expensive? How much more expensive would it be if communities had the right to veto a banner or participate in its design all the way? BTW, what is our cost-per-banner, and revenue-per-banner? Levivich ( talk) 16:12, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
an RfC on a single wiki, is not the way to decide the financial fate of all Wikimedia sitesis really quite illuminating. The WMF attitude seems to be that when allocating resources, that the English Wikipedia (the indisputable flagship of our free knowledge movement) is just a "single wiki" among 300 wikis, but when it comes to fundraising, it suddenly the most important wiki by far. That is a shockingly hypocritical disconnect from reality and an attitude that illuminates the severe problem we face now in late November 2022. We are ethical people and the ad mongers aren't. Deal with it decisively now. When we PLEAD for better software tools to curate content and communicate with mobile editors for example, we are not asking for things that would benefit the English Wikipedia only. These tools would be for the benefit of editors throughout the Wikimedia Foundation websites. Do editors on our French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias oppose this kind of software support? I do not think so. Anybody who tries to claim that this RFC does not reflect an overwhelming consensus is clearly wrong. Just an example that has nothing to do with the English Wikipedia per se: Year after year, the Android app for uploading photos to Commons has sucked and has deterred good faith contributors, and the WMF has repeatedly failed to deploy a reliable, bug free Android app to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons. Billions of people take photos worldwide on Android devices and it is extremely difficult for any of them to donate their photos under a free license. The app sucks. The app has sucked for years. Millions of dollars pour in and that app still sucks. Why the heck is that? Why can't a smartphone photo contibutor click three or four clearly labelled buttons and freely license their photo? Why does it take a half hour or more, and require a user to uninstall and reinstall the app to upload a single photo? Far smaller organizations deploy apps that work well. The butterfly editors and the dinosaur editors and the tropical storm editors and the asteroid editors may not have commented. They are entirely free to do so at any time. But the English Wikpedia editors and administrators who truly care about the governance of this project have spoken, and have spoken quite clearly. You need to do one of two things: Either come up with a RADICALLY DIFFERENT banner campaign that immediately creates a consensus in favor of your banners, or suspend your deceptive, unethical campaign on English Wikipedia for at least the next year. You can crank up your unethical ads on the French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese Wikpedias if you are determined to, and see how they react to your overreach. Stop lying about not advertising on Wikipedia when you advertise on Wikipedia every year. That is truly grotesque. The consensus among the active volunteer content creators who are dedicated to the future of this encyclopedia is that we are overwhelmingly fed up with your unethical overreach which enriches the careerists among you and disregards the unpaid volunteers who have literally created your prosperous lifestyles and your exceptionally generous annual incomes and fringe benefits. For the sake of all that is good and righteous, please speak with us frankly and responsively, instead of spouting condescending PR agent talking points. Many of us have spent years or decades blocking PR people, and we place a very high priority on frank speech instead of baffelgab. Do not treat us like we just fell off a turnip truck. Cullen328 ( talk) 07:15, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
… run our own banners along side the ones from WMF, asking people to NOT donate this year. Not an option I would actually encourage, just noting that if people are upset enough, it is an option. Blueboar ( talk) 02:06, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
"But even the most radical foundation that funds your start-up phase is going to want to rotate you out of its portfolio after a few years—that’s just how foundations work. If you didn’t use those few years to build an independent support base among the people you serve, then you’ll find yourself begging to an inevitably less-radical foundation—a foundation that will have all kinds of time-consuming questions and concerns about the best parts of your strategies and plans. The revolution will be funded—but by small donations that come from the people you serve or represent."
— Rules for Revolutionaries : How Big Organising Can Change Everything
I think that there are two issues blended together here. One is the broad general one that WMF has overall gone pretty badly astray. The other is the fundraising wording one. To me the latter has a simple fix. The banners HAVE given the (false) impression that that there is a threat to English Wikipedia's survival that needs money to resolve. Reword them to stop giving that impression. Sincerely, North8000 ( talk) 19:27, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
Between 29 November and 31 December the WMF will be running their English fundraising banners campaign (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, and US). Every year this results in a number of discussions objecting to certain aspects of the campaign but these discussions start too late to address any issues. This RfC, running before the campaign starts, is intended to prevent that from happening again.
The RfC started on 14 November when the WMF provides the banners they are planning and will run until 24 November (chosen so that if changes are required the WMF has time to implement them). On 24 November, the discussion will be hatted pending closure; closers are being pre-identified in order to facilitate a quick close.
Originally, the WMF were going to provide a complete listing of the banners they were going to run. This changed, and they only provided a sample on WPM.
In order to ensure that enough comment has been received that consensus is reached despite the shortened RfC period it has been listed prior to opening; editors who wished to be notified when it was opened put their name to the "Editors to notify" list, which was also pre-populated with editors who have participated in similar discussions
If there is a consensus that the banners are not appropriate to run but the WMF tries to run them without implementing the required changes then our proposed method to enforce the consensus is for Common.css to be modified to prevent them from appearing.
Editors to notify
|
---|
This list consists of editors who have added their name, or have participated in related discussions ( Review of English Wikimedia fundraising emails, Wikimedia Foundation English fundraising campaign - October pre-tests, and Wikipedia Signpost/2022-06-26/Special report). Please raise any issues with the list on the talk page.
|
Some of the banners tested between September and November are available below; they may be indicative of the final banners.
Banners
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The following banners ran between 2022-11-18 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-11-21 21:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 10% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-11-07 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-11-14 21:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 10% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-10-26 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-10-27 00:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 100% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-10-11 21:00 (UTC) and 2022-10-12 00:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 100% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-10-03 20:00 (UTC) and 2022-10-10 20:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 7% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
The following banners ran between 2022-09-23 20:00 (UTC) and 2022-09-25 20:00 (UTC) on enwiki for readers from Australia, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 10% of pageviews for logged-out readers included a banner, up to ten times per reader.
|
So, the RfC is about to conclude, and if there isn't a sudden switch of positions among non-WMF affiliated commenters, it will result in clear opposition to the banners. Then what? Asking the WMF to delay the fundraising or skip a year on enwiki seem extremely unlikely to have any chance of success. If people want to pursue that angle, feel free of course, but I think we should decide on what action to take otherwise.
Thr main possibilities seem to be either hiding the banners somehow, or adding our own banners above or below with the vision of this RfC about the "official" banners. Both may lead to WMF intervention (on a technical level and against people attempting to implement the RfC results), but that would be an extremely unwise move from the WMF judging from previous such incidents.
Thoughts? Fram ( talk) 13:00, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I think a lot of the objections miss the mark. I completely agree that it is not really ok to have banners suggesting that donations go exclusively to en.wp, when we all know that is for sure not the case, by a fairly wide margin. That should change, and I hope the office is hearing that from the community. What is not reasonable is asking a nonprofit organization to just skip a fundraising cycle. Like it or not, the WMF owns Wikipedia, and donations are what funds everything the foundation does. We can't make them just not do it, and we should not be trying to do that, or quibbling about what the banners look like, or anything other than the actual core issue, that the banners are not honest or clear about what the donations are actually for. Fundraising should always be as transparent as possible and I don't see how it is a negative to emphasize the global nature of this movement. Beeblebrox ( talk) 00:31, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
What is not reasonable is asking a nonprofit organization to just skip a fundraising cycle.Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 00:33, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
$('.frb-conversation')[0].innerHTML = $('.frb-conversation')[0].innerHTML.replace(/Wikipedia/g, 'Wikimedia')
Yngvadottir ( talk) 02:04, 25 November 2022 (UTC)We, the editors of the English-language Wikipedia, do not endorse the below/above banner. [link is to this RfC as closed by Joe Roe] The Wikimedia foundation has an endowment in excess of $X and only Y% of its spending in the last fiscal year was in support of Wikipedia and the other projects. Please see details [HERE] [link to an information page with links to WMF financial statements and explanation of items such as chapter support]. You may also wish to create an account, which does not entail identifying yourself and makes it possible to hide some of these banners.
I seem to have missed the opportunity to comment on the fundraising banner dispute above, but I am concerned about how things may evolve from this point, so it might be worth proposing a more concrete outcome, realizing that I may be out-of-time or out-of-scope for the current RfC, but I'll give it a try. Please pardon unaccustomed brevity from me, but I'm typing in a mobile on (US) Thanksgiving Day. But how about something like this:
1. For 2022, recognizing the current time constraints, the WMF will modify the banners to be used on En-WP in a good-faith effort to address the concerns discussed above about the accuracy of their contents. The En-WP community will allow those banners to appear this year.
2. For 2023 and subsequent years, the WMF will post the proposed text of the year's banners on-wiki each year by June 1 (about six months before the start of the banner campaign) to allow for an unhurried discussion with the goal of reaching consensus each year on wording that satisfies both the WMF's goals and the En-WP community concerns.
Thoughts? Regards to all, Newyorkbrad ( talk) 19:51, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
Hello again. Thank you all for the constructive comments here, which I took to the Wikimedia Foundation Trustees in a meeting the Board held yesterday along with staff. What the Board and staff have heard is quite clear, here and elsewhere: the Wikimedia Foundation should change the fundraising messaging to take into account more direct community and readers’ input.
Depending on the outcome of the RfC closure, hopefully the changes can be done by next Tuesday for the English campaign. The content the fundraising team would run next Tuesday will be based on the comments and ideas collected in this RfC, Meta, and other avenues. That draft messaging is being worked on and will be shared by the team tomorrow for further improvement. During the next year the team will develop a better process for this globally as there is quite a lot of detail to figure out.
More to the point, it is time for a reset between the Foundation and our communities on the seemingly intractable issues that we have been discussing for many years. Maryana will share more with you soon about the budget impacts of the changes in the fundraising approach, as well as the other concerns raised here (and elsewhere) about the direction of the Wikimedia Foundation -- NTymkiv (WMF) ( talk) 18:14, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
@ Shani (WMF): and @ Laurentius, Pundit, Victoria, NTymkiv (WMF), Lgruwell-WMF, and Phoebe: 1,344 words to tell us that nothing is really going to change any time soon other than instead of spending more money on the communities' concerns, the WMF is actually scaling back. But they are making cuts on precisely the areas where the volunteers need support rather than reducing the money the WMF spends on itself and its junkets and non-encyclopedic ventures.
What's the point of the CAC if the board simply always sides with the WMF and states that community concerns "are not within our remit" ? With such a statement the board has accurately shot itself in the foot and anything they say now is merely thin attempts at saving face. In contrast, it will lead to the action that the English Wikipedia editors are proposing here. Contrary to what the communities used to believe, the BoT is not a watchdog, and between the board and the WMF it's not even clear which tail is wagging which dog. Community members who are elected to the board usually get thrown off it for doing their job and exposing scandals of the highest order. Whoever, or whatever process appoints the CEOs doesn't have a history of making the best decisions - it's even rumoured now that the last CEO was actually 'asked' to leave.
Community-WMF tension is nothing new but this time it's reached it peak and everything is boiling over; comments from the WMF or the board might be in good faith but they are just fuelling the fire instead of directly and pro-actively addressing the issues. Either withdraw these intended banners or reap the consequences. This should be compulsory reading for you all, but will you click the link? Will you finally understand those wise tabulated concerns from yet another disenchanted volunteer who is slaving away at doing the Foundation's work for free? Work that is directly concerned with Wikipedia's increasingly fragile reputation for neutrality and accuracy. What is the WMF going to do about it if the community does indeed proceed with its threatened civil disobedience and block the banners? Fire all the volunteers? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 02:52, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
I am writing on behalf of the fundraising team, who have been taking in all the comments and ideas shared on this RfC and in other channels. It is clear there is a lot of care and passion for our projects and how we ask our readers to support them. Thank you. The team continues to welcome participation to improve messaging, and we’ll think more deeply about ways to improve the collaboration channels for future campaigns.
In response to this conversation, the team has created a new page where we can collaborate on messages. Jimmy is already there writing new banners based on testing over the past weekend and the discussion on the RfC. We ask for your help and ideas on how we can improve them together. Please join him! Thank you for helping create the campaign this year. MeganHernandez (WMF) ( talk) 10:08, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The initial scope of this RfC was the content of the banners, but it quickly went beyond that scope to include other issues with the banners and issues with our relationship with the WMF in general. This expanded scope remains unresolved and we now need to determine how to address those issues.
In regards to the banners, I believe that the process is relatively straightforward with three outstanding questions:
There is no time to address these questions prior to the December campaign - although I hope the WMF will consider and address on its own initiative the concerns raised - so we can instead hold a full RfC at a time convenient to us on them.
Addressing our relationship with the WMF is more complicated and I believe we need to work out our own idealized image of our relationship with the WMF before we can do so; we can then use this idealized image to sit down with the WMF and attempt to come to a compromise that will satisfy both of us. Determining this idealized relationship would itself be a multistep process; I believe we should start by having general discussions on the following topics:
Finally, I think we need a discussion on WP:CONEXCEPT and whether we can block fundraising banners to force the WMF to come to the table at times where we believe they are being obstinate to the detriment of Wikipedia and our mission. My reading of this discussion is that there would be a consensus, but I believe that formally establishing that, as well as establishing requirements for when we can use such a tool, would be beneficial. BilledMammal ( talk) 03:15, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The following banner wording is currently running in the UK (highlight emphasis mine):
To all our readers in the UK, Please don't skip this 1 minute read. This Monday December 5th, we’re asking for your support. We are the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and 12 other free knowledge projects. If you can this year, please join the 2% of readers who give. Now is the time we invite you to give £2 or whatever seems right. Wikipedia is different. No advertising, no subscription fees, no paywalls. Those don't belong here. Wikipedia is a place to learn, free from bias or agenda. Together, let's preserve this special space. If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, please support the technology that makes our projects possible and advance the cause of free knowledge worldwide. Show the world that access to independent and unbiased information matters to you. — The Wikimedia Foundation
To me, the highlighted passage seems to fall foul of the RfC outcome logged above that banners that state or imply any of the following are not considered appropriate on the English Wikipedia:
I've started a section at Wikipedia:Fundraising/2022 banners#"Together, let's preserve this special space" (current banner wording) to discuss this wording. -- Andreas JN 466 23:44, 5 December 2022 (UTC)