User:BilledMammal/Fundraising banners

Review of English Wikipedia fundraising banners
The WMF runs fundraising banners on the English Wikipedia throughout the year; since July 2021, the WMF has recorded running dozens of separate campaigns on the English Wikipedia. This discussion, prompted by a Signpost article, is intended to review whether these banners are appropriate and determine whether individual banners should be required to receive consensus before being run on the English Wikipedia.

Banners
Explanations:
 * %MINIMUM% is dependent on the country the reader is in, and can be seen here.
 * frb-replace-dayofweek is the day of the week the reader is seeing this on
 * frb-replace-seenCount-ordinalNum is the number of times the reader has seen this ad
 * frb-replace-valuecomparison is localization for the value comparison; it's usually just "a cup of coffee", but it can be "a couple of gold coins"
 * frb-replace-amt-ps4 is defined in the configuration file, but is usually $20
 * frb-replace-amt-ps5 is defined in the configuration file, but is usually $100

Discussion
These banners appear designed to suggest to readers that Wikipedia, as a free and ad-free encyclopedia, is under threat. They claim to need donations to protect Wikipedia's independence and keep it thriving, and they imply that these donations are all that is stopping Wikipedia from needing to add a subscription fee, keep Wikipedia as a non-profit, and to keep Wikipedia from becoming commercial.

This is misleading; in 2013 Erik Möller, the then-VP of Engineering and Product Development, estimated that Wikipedia could be comfortably kept online for 10 million per year; while this figure is likely to have increased with increased use and general inflation, it will still be far below the 162 million the Foundation received in the 2020-2021 financial year. As a consequence readers have misunderstood the situation, sometimes to heart-breaking effect; on meta Elli said that as a VRT agent I've received numerous emails from people on limited incomes who are donating money they need because they believe that Wikipedia is in trouble and that they need to give money to keep it online.

In January the WMF said that they were listening and collecting the feedback we saw around the Helpdesk, the Teahouse, the general VP boards on English Wikipedia, and here, but looking at the ads they have run since then very little has changed; if we want to address this issue, we are going to need to do so ourselves.

Proposal

 * Any fundraising banners that the WMF wishes to run on the English Wikipedia require prior consensus from the community. If this proposal is passed it will not go into effect for 60 days following the closure of the RfC, in order to give the WMF time to adjust their practices and obtain consensus.