Comments on: All Our Ideas in the Wikimedia fundraiser

By: Corinne Winson

Corinne Winson — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:16:58 +0000

I’ve added a banner suggestion, but not sure where / whether it will be displayed. My Java is so out of date that I can’t update; is it essential to submitting banner wording?

By: Manuel

Manuel — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 16:59:04 +0000

Yo no tengo cuenta bancaria, ¿hago mi depósito a Wikimedia Foundation, pero a qué número de cuenta y ciudad?

By: hashar

hashar — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:23:03 +0000

Well done! You guys are awesome. The idea of having the community choosing the banners is awesome =)

Vote for Brandon!!
http://www.allourideas.org/wikipedia-banner-challenge

By: NaBUru38

NaBUru38 — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:58:11 +0000

“Appeal” isn’t included in http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE_1500. I’ve passed the Certificate of Proficiency in English six years ago, but without checking a dictionary, I don’t know what “a personal appeal” means exactly. So try to find a banner that only includes words in the Basic English combined list.

By: Wikipedia Banner Challenge – SUBMITTERATOR

Wikipedia Banner Challenge – SUBMITTERATOR — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:44:50 +0000

[...] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/19/all-our-ideas-in-the-wikimedia-fundraiser/ [...]

By: Elitre

Elitre — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:24:30 +0000

Flawless, except that all the community that usually helps with the fundraiser (for free) is on Meta and will probably never hear of this. But nevermind. Good luck.

By: Matthew Salganik

Matthew Salganik — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:57:42 +0000

Hi TMg,

Thanks for the question about javascript. We tried to designed the site to encourage as many people as possible to vote as many times as possible. The more votes we collect, the faster we can find the most promising banners. To that end, we combine A/B tests and our judgement about what will increase participation.

Although we have not A/B tested it, we expected that javascript would lead to a faster, smoother site, and thus, more votes. However, as you point out, it is also the case that by using javascript we do prevent some people who have disabled javascript from voting. This is clearly not idea.

I think you are right that the best solution is to do both. We are currently working to improve other aspects of the site, and this is something that we add to our development queue.

By: Matthew Salganik

Matthew Salganik — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:49:02 +0000

Hi Elitre,

Thanks for your feedback. Although the front-end of the site looks pretty simple (basic pairwise comparison), there is a lot of infrastructure in the back-end to 1) choose the pairs carefully, 2) calculate scores and present other data visualizations in real-time, 3) export data in csv files for analysis, etc. Our code is open-source so you can see some of what I am talking about here: https://github.com/allourideas.

I’m sure that Wikimedia’s awesome developers could have integrated all of this into their systems (or rebuilt it from scratch), but it would have taken a lot of time and I know that they are all already busy working on other projects. That is why we offered to help.

By: Erik Moeller

Erik Moeller — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:41:10 +0000

Elitre, not everything has to be done on Meta. It’s good to experiment with new tools and processes instead of locking ourselves into MediaWiki’s feature set and Wikimedia’s processes. This is an ephemeral experiment, so it’s _exactly_ the kind of thing we should try with third party partners.

By: Zack

Zack — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:40:10 +0000

Dear Elitre, The All Our Ideas people volunteered the site and it was not something we would devote resources to building ourselves.