Talk:Fundraising 2012

Requests from info-ja queue

OTRS info-ja has received some request about Fundraising. I inform you that the list of them is available on otrswiki:Info-ja/Fundraising#2011. thanks,--aokomoriuta 17:58, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

All those JA requests during 2011 fundraiser were concerned with transaction way i.e. requests for more diversity of money transferring. Since the link leads a Japanese page, I'd here give a English summary, some tickets may appear more than once:

• Accept more credit card companies - otrs:6271305
  • otrs:6310028 - Accept JCB credit card too. (note #1: Japanese residents can use JCB on PayPal for payment, WMF donation I/F may have just been confused on this issue, but I'm not sure).
• Enable to transfer from convenience stores - otrs:6271305, Ticket:2011122810005051 (note #2: major convenience stores in Japan, e.g. 7-Eleven, provide nationwide money transfer services like tax, utility bills　and other for-profit services. They want WMF does the same.)
• Open bank accounts in Japanese banks and Postal Office - otrs:6337359, Ticket:2011122810005051
• Accept electric money (no particular system is mentioned) - Ticket:2011122610002174

Although some of those requests seem just to come from misunderstanding or to miss the already affordable ways unfortunately, for the record, I'd list all of them but one which has no indication of request. Refinement of User I/F and messages may reduce such misdirection hopefully. --Aphaia 19:16, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

Schedule?

Very frequently the fundraiser runs into issues like glitches in banners, accidentally placing "Help Wikipedia" banners on non-Wikipedia projects, and leaving mistakes/typos/etc on banners or appeals, so I was wondering if we could get a schedule in advance of the fundraiser of which banners are going to run when and where, so they could be tested and looked over before they're live on sites with millions of people looking at them? I think this would be very beneficial, and would really reduce the number of problems popping up mid-fundraiser. --Yair rand (talk) 18:39, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• Hi, sorry about that error you saw & thanks for letting us know. We caught it, but it did run for a little while. It's pretty difficult to give you exact times for fundraising testing since we are testing at different times in each country, and will be running more frequent tests as we get closer to the launch. For the next round of testing, we are working on setting up the campaigns to launch around 9am local time in most countries. Please do leave a note here or on IRC in wikimedia-fundraising if you catch an error. We're trying to have as few as possible! Meganhernandez (talk) 22:17, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

  Could we see the banners before they're tested live, maybe? --Yair rand (talk) 23:18, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

  You can see the campaigns and banners we're working on at Special:CentralNotice. To preview a banner, you can add ?banner=BANNERNAME to the end of a wiki url e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_FpcwDropAU or https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude?banner=B12_WMDE_Test7_121101_Expand_Green2

  As you'll see there's a lot of banners, and we're often making changes up to the last minute, so giving a schedule for everything would be difficult. We do have our own QA processes before putting anything live. Yes things do sometimes slip through the cracks but this is a small minority. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 14:52, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Banner I just saw

Hi there! Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this but I just saw an awesomely designed blue banner when I was visiting a Wikipedia page. I wanted to show it to a friend but it doesn't seem to appear anymore. I've noticed there are various "banner=" query strings listed in your fundraiser tests, but I can't find any that look like the one I saw. Is there a way to find it? CXI (talk) 14:29, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks! Is this the banner you're looking for? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_FpcwDropAU We're testing a bunch of variations in different countries so you'll probably see a few different ones coming up. Thanks for the message :) Meganhernandez (talk) 22:18, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Aha. That's the one. Super cool - it got me to finally get around to donating something. Hope it tests well. :) CXI (talk) 02:36, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Hooray! Thanks for your donation! Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 14:55, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

NL / DE

Hi,

I live in the Netherlands, use a Dutch IP address and am Dutch. Still, I get a banner in German, and if I click on it, I am invited in German to donate to the German company. Any settings mistake? Effeietsanders (talk) 19:18, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Currently I'm in the train on an open hotspot in the Netherlands, and again the German banner is shown. I strongly suspect all Dutch people get this. Effeietsanders (talk) 20:31, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

On a third IP address now the banner seems to be totally gone. Not sure if configuration has changed or that the IP is simply in a different range. Effeietsanders (talk) 21:03, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

I've double checked, and the Netherlands doesn't appear to be allocated any of Germany's banners. Could you please visit https://bits.wikimedia.org/geoiplookup and tell us what it gives you for City and Country? Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Peter,

I'm no longer at the IP I used to be at. One of them was 84.81.200.33 though - I guess you can enter/check it manually. Anyway, as indicated above, at the current IP/time I don't get any banner at all. It might be that things changed over time or over IP. Effeietsanders (talk) 21:53, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

There's no way to check an IP manually as far as I know. I'm fairly sure the geoiplookup uses MaxMind, but according to https://www.maxmind.com/ 84.81.200.33 is definitely in the Netherlands. I suppose our database could not be as up to date as theirs.

You aren't seeing banners now because the WMF banners are not set to appear for logged in users. Wikimedia Germany's are, hence if it thought you were in Germany, you would have seen banners. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 22:08, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Logged out I indeed see an (ugly) blue banner in Dutch with some weird language in it (Wikipedia being a foundation, and the foundation being a website etc), so I guess that for this specific time/IP combination it is working fine. Effeietsanders (talk) 22:57, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

in Germany we have a green banner with a text saying nothing about the WMF. I am confused about the German company you talked about. Till Mletzko (WMDE) (talk) 08:08, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

The German banner was indeed green and better phrased :) The Blue banner was Dutch. Effeietsanders (talk) 09:47, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Feedback NL

Hi,

I just took a deeper look at the Dutch infrastructure (yellow & blue banners) and would like to share some feedback (I hope this is the right page). The current translation of the banner is suboptimal I'm afraid. Due to its grammar it is suggested that Wikipedia is a Foundation etc. Probably it would be worth while to let a Dutch person look at it more in depth. When I click on the banner, I get sent to this page. Seems rather similar to last year.

• I note that the Foundation has chosen not to mention its deduction status under Dutch law (which was also my feedback last year).
• Also somehow the language links are missing. Currently when you're in the Netherlands, the banner seems to assume you want to hear Dutch, and the only language I get the landing page in, is Dutch. We have a rather existent immigrant community which might to learn about this in English.
• The top button is 'creditcard or bank transfer' but when you click on it, only credit card is offered.
• When I choose iDEAL, the Rabobank option doesn't work. It doesn't give any error, but simply reloads the page.
• When I choose PayPal, the default option that is suggested is the credit card option, and the PayPal account option is minimized. Perhaps it would make sense to do this the other way around, since there already is a credit card option explicitely available.

I hope this feedback is helpful, Effeietsanders (talk) 11:30, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey lodewijk. Not everything here is under my purview but what is ill help you with. For the rest, I will email tech and cc you in.

• With the banner translations I would happily take on any corrections, or if you feel its needed a complete rewrite. If you have the time would you willing to?
• RE: tax deductability text - Yeah, I am sure I mentioned this myself to someone and will follow up.
• Not sure what you mean by language links?
• Ill look into the "creditcard/bank transfer" button
• iDeal: Ill pass this onto tech.
• Paypal: This is unfortunately the default option. It is controlled by cookies from paypal. If you have recently logged into your paypal account you'll have a cookie that will force the account option to come up as the main choice.

Hope that's answers some questions, let me know about the others. Jseddon (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Seddon, thanks for the reply. FOr the language links: there are currently no links at all to alternative languages. I guess from your reply that is unintentional. Effeietsanders (talk) 16:55, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

As far as my memory serves, I don't think we have ever had alternative language links on any of the languages. At least the WMF hasn't. It's an idea I'll happily suggest, but it might not happen this year. Jseddon (WMF) (talk) 17:41, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, I thought that at the least there was always an English version available. I assume also for other countries you have multiple languages available? Effeietsanders (talk) 17:59, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Is it that you simply arn't seeing any other banners in NL other than dutch? Seddon (talk) 19:29, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

We absolutely used to offer the donation material in languages other than Dutch, where we could, based upon (I believe) the language of the project from which you were visiting. I'll ask James Alexander to comment, he'd remember better than I. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 07:52, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

australian banners misdeployed?

I got [1] as an anon user at 5pm PST in the US, which seems to be the Australian banner? The error message when you don't choose an amount says "please donate at least 2AUD" and there's a BPay option which is not a US thing. So unless something drastic happened to California while I've been at work... :) (my ip is 169.237.140.154). -- phoebe | talk 00:47, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

can't replicate it and I guess the test has been turned off, so maybe it was some odd caching artifact. -- 169.237.140.154 00:50, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, that certainly is very odd, the campaign only shows to be geolocated to Australia. Thehelpfulone 00:51, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Maybe b/c the 24 hr test is still wrapping up there?? I *may* have accidentally followed a banner link from somewhere else, so don't put too much energy into tracking this down.

comments!

Is there anywhere to see the comments? They always make my year... -- phoebe | talk 00:56, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Megan's Wikimedia-L mailing list post. :-) Thehelpfulone 01:06, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Comments from donors? 71.215.79.206 15:29, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Previewing translated pages

I've been translating many of the landing pages into Norwegian Bokmål (nb). Translation is done sentence by sentence, without context, so I wonder if there is a page where I can preview how the final banners and landing pages will look like? Danmichaelo (talk) 22:03, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

You can see the banners being tested in English using the links on the testing page. You can access the current landing page by clicking on the 'donate' link in the sidebar of the English wikipedia, and the current Norwegian landing page (which may still be last year's version) by clicking on the 'donate' link in the sidebar of the Norwegian Wikipedia. Some of the message documentation has links to these pages. Lloffiwr (talk) 13:05, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

CentralNotice-Translate integration

Now that the non-English campaigns have been postponed by half a year,[2] will work on the CentralNotice-Translate extension integration resume so that we can use a proper translation system? We currently rely heavily on a system that doesn't scale, with manual copy-and-pasting, manual status updates, labyrinthine templates... all very hard, error-prone and with basically no quality assurance. --Nemo 07:28, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes indeed, that was one of the major reasons for postponing them. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 14:43, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Postponement of fundraiser

Is the fundraiser also to be postponed to April 2013 in the three chapter regions France, Germany and Switzerland? Lloffiwr (talk) 12:49, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

No, it's already underway in those countries. They won't be seeing more banners in April 2013. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

December 2012 fundraiser available in other languages?

Is the fundraiser running in December 2012 in the UK, USA, Canada, NZ and Australia going to be appearing on the English language wikis only? If it is going to be appearing on other language wikis, what are the arrangements for localisation in those languages, bearing in mind that it is the appearance of English-language banners on non-English wikis which causes the most aggravation? Lloffiwr (talk) 12:55, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

It will be appearing on the English language wikis only. We know that English banners on other language sites are annoying; this change gives us more time to get translations and avoid that as much as possible, if not entirely, during the April fundraiser. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 14:49, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Questions

• Following on from the "other languages" point in the NL section above: under the new system, in what month does a person using the English Wikipedia in Algeria see the banner, and in what month does a person using the Arab Wikipedia in the United States see the banner? Also, can we get the stats to give true comparatives, or at least some figures that are like-for-like? Johnbod (talk) 22:13, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey Johnbod. So the plan at the moment is currently to have the top 5 EN countries run from end-November to end-December. In those 5 countries rather than just straight en we are thinking making this multilingual for those 5 countries. There may be down days to rest the banners and such during that time but we are trying to end on December 31st.

The remainder of the world will see the full multilingual campaign at some point during april (the exact dates have yet to be decided).

I am not sure exactly what you mean by true comparatives. What is it that your after? Hope this helps.Jseddon (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

The stats at [3] seem to just compare the raw totals for 2010, 2011 and 2012, not on a like-for-like basis, which is presumably rather different.

Schedule? (2)

At what amount raised will the fundraiser end? 21:13, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

The Annual Plan says $46.1 million, which is $7.2 million more than last year, but who knows what proportion of that has already been taken care of with grants mailed in or from grantmaking organization applications. This slide suggests $5.36 million had already been raised in October, so if you add that to the $22.12 million from the fundraiser so far, I guess that leaves $18.62 million yet to go, which looks to be about 15 days more at the lowest rate that was raised when the banner was being shown to everyone. But the amount raised usually goes up two- to four-fold in the last week of December, so figure about a week. 67.41.200.185 02:15, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

As of the last I heard -- we've stopped fundraising this year. We will be putting up thank you banners shortly. However we're going to be putting up another round of banners in April (for the countries we have not already targeted.) I believe the monetary target is $6million. There's two reasons for doing this that have been explained to me. The first is we wish to broaden our horizon and learn how to fundraise in non English speaking countries (in the old model we optimized English and pretty much just left it at that which is something we're trying to change.) The second is that it is a prudent measure to attempt to distribute our income more around the globe instead of just relying on the big English speaking countries and our fundraising chapters. That being said, please don't treat this as authoritative - the person to bug is Zack Exley as he is the true source of information about this subject. Mwalker (WMF) (talk) 05:36, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Zack goes into some detail in this email from December 14, and mentions "we're hoping to reach our US$25 million goal in the next few days." If that's the actual goal, then we're only $2.5 million from it. Here's the chapter fundraising spreadsheet that Megan posted to wikimedia-l, which possibly explains the difference. One thing is clear from the graph: This year, for the first time, we deliberately targeted a slower growth rate and then turned off serious fundraising most of December to meet those lower expectations. Even though, with pageviews at 16.4 billion last December and 20.8 billion last month, we clearly could have handled an increased growth rate. I intend to be quite vocal about this behavior during the next Board of Trustees elections. 67.41.200.185 15:14, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Is the data for Fundraiser Statistics available?

Is there a place I could grab the data used to produce: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics ?

I am looking for this exact data set - same fields, same level of aggregation - just in a table, rather than a graph. I would like to use this to produce an interactive visualization that I would then share back with everyone. Let me know, thanks! Tarastar42 (talk)

Yes, sorta... The data is currently aggregated and published into a database on the WMF cluster. If you have shell access you'll be able to grab it from the foundationwiki.public_reporting* tables, if not we can easily publish a one time dump of that table. If you're looking for a more real time data source we have plans to provide it but it's down the list aways (that's fungible though -- we just haven't had a need yet.) Tell us more about what your use case is and we'll see what we can do. Mwalker (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

There are also some datasets about past fundraisers that have been made available at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/fundraising/datasets/. Data about this year will likely be published in the Spring.

Peter Gehres (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks so much to both of you! Here is my use case: I am developing a website that will allow anyone to create embeddable motion charts from data stored on a Google spreadsheet, and I would like to use WMF fundraiser data to create an interactive demonstration chart. The site is not close to ready for prime-time yet, but you can see the basic proof-of-concept at: http://motionals.org (very rough still!). Right now, the site shows only one dataset - and it is outdated and boring - but I am getting ready to implement the feature that will let users connect their own data. I am working to create a few different sample datasets for people to be able to play with, and the WMF is very near-and-dear to my heart... plus I think this data would be particularly cool in motion chart form. It is small enough that I can handle it, rich enough to provide lots of options, and dramatic enough to clearly show the trends. Once I am done, anyone will be able to configure the chart, save their configuration, and embed it anywhere.... that is the plan anyway!

I don't need real-time data, or even any updates. Ideally, I would love to just have the exact data set from the existing graph, from the beginning of time up until yesterday. I would then upload it to a Google Spreadsheet, which would be public to view. I can manually add the new data in each day, taking it straight from the existing graph... I don't mind keeping it updated.

I took a look at the datasets that Peter mentioned (thank you!)...but the Daily Aggregates are a much more granular set of data that would take a ton of work to get into a single sheet that I could use, and the Donation Dumps hasn't been updated since 2010. I don't have shell access... at least, I don't think so. Any other pointers? Thanks again for all your help! Tarastar42 (talk)

The data in the table might not be what you want then. We only have data in this table from the start to the end of the officially recognized fundraisers. The Daily Aggregate table does, however, hold all the daily data. We will not be able to release another version of the daily aggregate table until after this Fundraiser is completed due to how the data is transformed. I will ask Legal though about the procedures for releasing this data. Mwalker (WMF) (talk) 23:19, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

All the data I am asking for has been released already and is updated daily, completely publicly accessible in the existing chart... I am not asking for anything that isn't already out there for public consumption. It is just that to get it into the format I want, I would have to re-type it all.... or maybe scrape it somehow? I guess I could do that.... I was just hoping that there was a better way. The Daily Aggregate is much more information than I need, carved into too many separate tables... I just need the same data that already appears beneath the current chart whenever you hover over a specific day: total amount, # of donations, max donations, average gift.... that is it! If this is difficult for some reason, don't worry about it... I will just figure out how to extract it from the current public graph. Thanks anyway! Tarastar42 (talk)

I know :) There's a couple reasons I'm passing it through legal. One is that I'm not sure what I have to do for a one off data release (even if it is available in other forms) because I've never done it before and the other is a bit of CYA -- the foundation is understandably very touchy about fundraising data. I pulled the dump this afternoon so it's ready -- just awaiting sign off. Give me till tomor:row before going off and doing something as painful as screenscraping. As you say, this should be pretty easy. 05:13, 12 December 2012 (UTC) (for Mwalker (WMF))

I totally get it, and I really appreciate your effort and responsiveness! So sorry if I am being a pain... I am truly a WMF fangirl and my intentions are only to contribute a cool chart, as an addition to the cool chart you already have. But I can be patient... though I am very curious to know if I could greasemonkey that data out of there somehow... should be possible but I am not sure my kung-fu is up to the job! Thanks again, and take care! Tarastar42 (talk)

Still in process... Not ignoring you :p It's become very much a learning exercise for me -- I now know who I need to talk to in order for it to get injected into the appropriate work queues; which has now been done (enter more *thumb twiddling* and *glare face*). It's totally possible to get the data out of the HTML -- you're looking for all nodes in class 'fundraiserstats-view-box'. (I just found that myself -- I'm a bit horrified that we didn't just throw down a JSON object!). 216.38.130.166 04:33, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

No worries... I am grateful for your assistance! I did take a peek at the html... I am now convinced I could extract the data, if I need to, but would much prefer a cleaner way! Appreciatively, Tarastar42 (talk)

Ugh... holiday season means people work slower or something. Since I can't give you the data directly, I quickly whipped up a python script that should get you everything you need. Feel free to modify! It's not an ideal thing; but it gets the job done. Apologies that bureaucracy is working against us this week. Mwalker (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

You = rock star! Thanks! Tarastar42 (talk)

Wikimedia Foundation employee salaries

Feel free to join the discussion here. Nirvana2013 (talk) 12:43, 16 December 2012 (UTC)