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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-09/Fundraiser

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Fundraiser

“Wikipedia Forever” fundraiser arouses controversy

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By Phoebe, Sage Ross, and Pretzels

The 2009 Wikimedia Fundraiser began on 10 November, according to Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving for the Foundation. The messages and design for the fundraiser this year were developed with a PR firm called Fenton Communications. Fenton was hired on retainer over the next year to work on public relations for the Foundation, including the fundraiser and to help "to build the credibility" of Wikipedia; this is part of the Communications Campaign noted in the 2009–2010 WMF annual plan.

Once again, the fundraiser will feature site-wide banners across all projects. The messages for the banners are listed on Meta, while mockups of the sitenotice designs are listed on the fundraiser development site (with discussion on meta). A mockup of the donation page can also be found on the site.

The fundraiser has an overall theme of "Wikipedia Forever". Notes about the meanings of some of the individual banner messages are on meta, in a note from Jelly Helm, the PR lead.

Criticism

The planned "Wikipedia Forever" campaign started drawing fire soon after the details of the campaign were made public in draft form in mid-October. Wikimedians saw in the campaign messages overtones of totalitarian propaganda, cultishness, and arrogance. The style of the messages was also criticized, with messages in all caps perceived as shouting.

An anonymous critic created wikipediaforever.org, which leads with "Chauvinism 4eva! A cult of personality 4eva! Wikipedia 4eva!™", and a "creepy" picture of Jimmy Wales. A single link leads to an explanation of some of the central objections to the campaign.

Wikimedia board member Samuel Klein (User:Sj) noted that:

A lot of these messages are ones I wouldn't use in a public talk for fear of not being understood, or coming across as arrogant - when we are really mainly modest about the known gaps in coverage, failings of our systems that we are improving, and the many things we have still to learn from other fabulous knowledge-sharing projects out there.

Messages like "This is all we know" and "Look at what you've done", said Klein, were less compelling than the comments from donors, which he described as genuine.

Rand Montoya responded to some of the criticism, noting that the current drafts for banner messages had toned down the use of all caps. However, he defended the core message as likely to be effective at both attracting donors and "elevat[ing] our perception and impact to the world." Different groups, he said, respond well to different messages, and donation data collected over the course of the fundraiser would be used to decide which messages to emphasize and which to remove from the campaign.

Wikipedians have been posting alternative suggestions to Twitter and Identi.ca under the hashtag #WikipediaFundraisingSlogans (tweets, dents).

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  • The Signpost cannot include images of the campaign due to Wikimedia Foundation copyright, yeah cause the WMF is all about teh free culture....nothing corporate about it at all...it's pure grassroots, just like the teabaggers. But I do like the title...Wikipedia 4evah...kinda reminds me of the cinematic masterpiece Batman Forever. On the subject of which; Rand Montoya, I'm so sorry about your father.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) (talk) 02:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • What a strange campaign that PR firm is pushing on us... I liked the old one they didn't do where donating wikipedians quotes were shown on wikipedia. It made me feel like I was important for donating and that wikipedia was made up of the people who contributed to it, fiscally, intelectually, and otherwise. Not this campaign. It makes me feel like the PR firm is laughing at me or feels I'm stupid. --Lyc. cooperi (talk) 02:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Quite clearly, we have started. Whether Wikipedia will be forever is out of our hands, although I suspect that having achieved what has been achieved thus far, Wikipedia will persist for some time. There is still much work to be done, not just in creating new articles, but in maintaining the more mature ones, the authors of which may no longer be around, or have moved to other interests. I perceive this as a crossroads, because we not only have to create new articles, but also deal with updates, for which we have little structured process, by managing the {{cn}}, {{deadlink}} and other maintenance templates. Some balance between creating the new and maintaining the old seems to be, if not overdue, at least more widely publicised. Rodhullandemu 02:11, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The choice of firm and strategy explain pretty neatly why I wouldn't donate money to the foundation. What a waste of cash. Protonk (talk) 02:43, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • This looks really ... bad. Paul August ☎ 03:45, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wow. This is the best that a professional PR firm can come up with? Giant capital letters? The 'forever' thing? I'm sorry, but whoever approved this on the Foundation's end needs to reconsider, because it's awful. Tony Fox (arf!) 05:33, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not so much concerned about the quality, but about the hypocrisy of Wikipedia using a media firm that will slap a restricted copyright on a number of 3-word slogans used to promote a free culture project like Wikimedia. They need to be fired or educated, even if they do it for free. Timeo Danaos and all that... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • This campaign still doesn't answer the most important question that any donation campaign needs to answer: Why does WMF need the money? What is it going to do with it? Until someone in charge gets a clue, I'm spending the money I could donate on something which I know will help the Foundation achieve its most important goal -- buying books to use to contribute content from. Maybe more of us ought to do the same. -- llywrch (talk) 17:44, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here are a couple of points in defense of the campaign without even having seen it. The first point is that years of exposure to NPR and PBS pledge drives should have convinced everyone that there is no non annoying way to beg users for money. As long as we as a community reject commercialization (ie. advertising) we are going to have to put up with the irritation of fund raising campaigns. The second and more important point is that people need to realize that the primary target of such a campaign is not the community of editors. Although some editors contribute money (I usually contribute a little), their biggest contribution to the project is content. The target of the fund raising campaign is going to be the vastly larger group of people who use WP as a reference, but do little or no editing, and that group is not likely to respond best to the same message that editors/readers of signpost would respond best to. The proof of the pudding will be the amount of cash raised.Rusty Cashman (talk) 19:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The logo/slogan/whatever is completely inappropriate and unprofessional. I'm shocked that it was apparently designed by a professional company. I am also entirely in agreement with Llywrch - I shall not be donating a penny, especially with such an arrogant and obnoxious banner in my face. Majorly talk 19:16, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I likely will be donating but this does seem like a really bad idea. The quotes from donors came across as very sincere and nicely stated. This comes across as cultish, self-promoting and arrogant. I'm a bit appalled that a professional PR firm actually came up with this. JoshuaZ (talk) 19:32, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • AWFUL. TRULY. AWFUL.© If the PR firm wants Wikipedia to look amateurish and cobbled together in about three minutes by a few nerds with nothing better to do, then they have succeeded. Where's the sense of the sum of all knowledge, put together from people with all kinds of level of expertise? If the Wikimedia Foundation wants their projects to be taken seriously, they should have a campaign that has at least a modicum of professionalism. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 19:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm pretty sure the community would have done this better. Unlike most other companies, the WMF has a vast community of users which could help in such matters, including many experts in web design et al, yet they involve us minimally - just to give feedback when it's done, why ? Cenarium (talk) 01:09, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is hilariously bad. Can we put this one up right now? — RockMFR 01:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikipedia forever? What hubris. How about "Wikipedia: until something even better comes along" instead? Jclemens (talk) 05:20, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • A discussion at WP:VP/P has been begun in an attempt to hide the banners; see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Abolish the silly headers. —Ed (talk • contribs) 05:35, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • When I first saw this, I thought a vandal had done it – I only realised it was legitimate when I opened the Signpost. I most certainly will not be donating again if the money is spent on something like this. "THIS IS EVERYTHING WE KNOW", seriously?? It's not a compliment. I love Wikipedia, but really. It pretty much turns into a joke of the website's content and trustworthiness. --Epiq (talk) 09:32, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The Signpost cannot include images of the campaign because of Wikimedia Foundation copyright [...]" — can you elaborate on why that is? The Signpost is – arguably – part of the English Wikipedia, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, so I honestly don't see the problem. I imagine there might be concerns about free licensing and "combined works", but we don't otherwise have a problem with including non-free images, either; they're not fundamentally incompatible with our licensing, or at least that's the current consensus. -- 88.70.199.246 (talk) 12:02, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I took that out; it was added to the original story by someone. I don't know what we can and can't include; the images are copyrighted b/c they include the Wikipedia logo. At any rate, you can view the banners on Meta and the dev site, the links are given in the story. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 17:49, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I added this line, because I wanted to include an image of the controversial banners, such as m:File:Intro Banner.png. Bizarrely, they are all licensed as "This file is copyrighted [...] has not been licensed under the GFDL [...] and requires permission [for use]". But if I took my own identical screenshot, would that be permissible? — Pretzels Hii! 19:31, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ugh. I too thought it was something one overenthusiastic editor had created, and was busy looking for the discussion about getting rid of it. Very disappointing to see that the eyesore has actually been paid for! --Slp1 (talk) 12:54, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Erik Möller (Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation) is now addressing the objections at MediaWiki_talk:Common.css#Removal_of_donation_messages, and has overturned their removal from this project. However, he has temporarily disabled them (globally, via CentralNotice) due to HTML bugs that had been pointed out.
    There were also some comments by Rand Montoya on the issue in the 2009-11-06 IRC office hours.
    Some translators also voiced the impression that the slogans were better adapted to an U.S. audience which might be used to bolder approach in advertising, while other cultures value understatement more - to the point that the slogans might even create a PR backlash there. (E.g. by reminding East Germans of Communist party slogans; such a danger would presumably be smaller in countries lacking a totalitarian past, like the U.S.) In this light it would be interesting to know how much experience the company has with creating slogans that work globally in many languages and cultures; from a quick glance at their website they seem to cater mostly to the U.S. market (while they have a Latin American team and some international clients, the highlighted example campaigns for such clients mostly seem to have targeted a U.S. audience, apart from organizing concerts abroad[1]).
    Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, that's it! The only reason we non-U.S. citizens dislike these kind of garish, hyperbolic platitudes is that we're all huddled up in a corner, terrified that the totalitarian dictators who ruled over us all up until recently will come back and get us again. If only we could be as enlightened as the Americans, then we could learn to love this crap. Lampman (talk) 17:34, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sigh* Not only do I ALSO hate this fundraising idea, but I am ALSO AMERICAN and deeply offended. There may also be other Americans on Wikipedia who dislike this just as much as you do. DaL33T (talk) 21:29, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. -- llywrch (talk) 22:08, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. (I'm just SICK of having to see comments online saying that all americans are fat, illiterate, etc.) DaL33T (talk) 23:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe I shouldn't have expressed myself sarcastically. My point was that it's ridiculous to rationalise people's dislike for this campaign based on nationality. They dislike it because it's bad. Lampman (talk) 04:00, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
EVERYBODY under the sun hates it EXCEPT for the guys in charge. I'm boycotting Wikipedia until further notice. There's no justice. DaL33T (talk) 05:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • The campaign looks like some one new to the field has designed it, and the word 'Forever' has been overused. After seeing this campaign, I would certainly think if I need to donate my time and money for WikiMedia. Money is a no for certain. Let Wiki stay the way it is now and make it more organized and structured, going away with IP edits to remove vandalism. Kiranmayee&#124కిరణ్మయి (talk) 16:04, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am not as concerned about the fact that the ads were poorly contrived and presented. This sort of thing can be fixed, particularly by the largest aggregate group of free content generators in the world today. I am far more concerned that the foundation paid money which could otherwise have been spent on hardware and technical salaries. Without this loss, we would only need a (no calculat, assuming 2.5M drive) ~10% less effective a fundraiser to break even, and the people who spent their time in the marketing department could be released to do something actually useful (edit a page?). User A1 (talk) 02:01, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with others, WIKIPEDIA FOREVER is terrible and I can't believe the WMF paid for it. I also agree with others that the comments from donors are much better. We've relied on community to get us this far. I think community should decide the slogans/appeals for next year. The consultants clearly just don't get it. --bodnotbod (talk) 15:52, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Make sure we cover what matters to you – leave a suggestion.
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