Talk:Fundraising and Funds Dissemination/Survey Question

Like I said on my scratch pad page, I think we can probably assume that people understood the original question to be asking "how should the Wikimedia movement spend its money" even though we actually asked "how should the Wikimedia Foundation spend its money." But -- just to be absolutely clear -- I think we should change the question from "the foundation" to "the Wikimedia movement" or just "Wikimedia." Sue Gardner 17:59, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

If it is changed to movement, than the chapter points are a bit self-serving (it is not a goal of the movement to support chapters, it is a means), or at least one could add "supporting the WMF", which would be a valid question in the movement context although again mixing means with goals. --Dami 20:19, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Why doesn't someone take a crack at breaking it into two questions, as per the thread right now on internal? If the second question proves impossible to construct, we can ditch it and just get out of this what we can. ("What we can" would mean 'what do people want the money spent on,' rather than 'who should spend it.') Hope that makes sense. Thanks. Sue Gardner 20:36, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

The main problem with this question is that it doesn't take into account how much things cost. I think almost everyone would agree that we should spend at least as much on core technology as is necessary in order to keep the site running. If that turns out to be 99% of our funds, then we should spend 99% of our funds on technology. Likewise, if we can get everyone in the world editing Wikipedia with only 1% of our funds, then I think almost everyone would agree that we shouldn't be spending more than 1% of our funds on attracting new editors. I don't think the question should be able dividing up funds, but simply about ranking priorities. For that to work, some budget items would need to be split into core and non-core (or perhaps 3 levels) - people could then rank attracting new editors as less important than core technology (keeping the servers running) but more important than non-core technology (new features and enhancements). It becomes rather more difficult to choose what budget items to list, but you would get much more meaningful information (if I were presented with that question, I would probably just ignore it because I don't have enough information to give an accurate answer). --Tango 20:40, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

That's a good point, and to be honest, the question was originally written (by me) as part of an informal survey of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, as I set out to begin building the 2011-12 plan. That may be why it reads the way it does -- because my goal was to survey people who are well-informed, rather than people who don't know much about our operations. But Thomas, why don't you take a crack at designing a question that would be useful to us? Rather than asking 'allocate $100,' maybe we should try a format that asks people to rank-order priorities, or some such? Sue Gardner 20:52, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Has the target population for this survey been defined? John Vandenberg 01:50, 26 October 2011 (UTC)