Wikipedia:Fundraising redesign

The 2007 Wikimedia Fundraiser has begun. Many of us think that the banner being used is undesirable, and wish it could be improved. It has been suggested that if we can do better, then we can replace it with one or more alternative designs.

So if you ever wanted to help design a banner that will be shown to tens of millions of people now is your chance. The current Fundraiser is scheduled to run for 2 months (ending December 22). A reasonable goal may be to try and have the first alternative(s) ready within two weeks (if not sooner) and possibly rotating through several during the two month period.

Designs that can be used across many Wikimedia projects are more valuable that Wikipedia specific ones. Also, designs should look okay at the lowest, widely used screen resolution (800x600), suggesting banner widths no larger than ~630px.

As of November 4, 2007, the banner has been replaced with a new one. Comments on the new banner are also welcome.

Requirements

The Law Of The Annoying Public Service Ads

Minimal banners are nice, but big annoying public service announcements net more money, and frankly, WMF does need the cash (else no more wikipedia at some point :-P )

discussion

So can we do something that's both tasteful and actually nets cash all at once? Tall order, I know. If folks come up with something sane, Kim or DragonsFlight(probably?) will be able to obtain the permission to put it up, and consequently will put it up.

requirements

So there's several requirements we need:

• Needs to look nice
• Not be annoying
• Needs to get people to actually donate.

-Anything else?

Some previous discussion, not yet refactored...

Probably we should just show the actual designs...

Also, it doesn't actually need to be a banner!

• Image:Some Attempts at better sitenotice.png, for some of my own misguided attempts to make something that looks less bothersom. ^^;; Anyone want to help make something nicer and less invasive than what's there now? --Kim Bruning 02:08, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
• Image:Movie.png is the movie image on commons. If someone were to upload a nicer variant, we would likely use it. :-) (The image is currently protected, but we can ask commons admins to unprotect or replace it of course! :-) ) --Kim Bruning 02:37, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
• [1] flashing (maybe not)
• [2] subdued.

The current banner is not... particularly aesthetically pleasing. Is anyone willing to use a silver-and-white, more Wikipedia-themed banner? I noticed Image:Wikipedia-banner-240-en.png and its interwiki counterparts today, what do people think? ~ Riana ⁂ 04:09, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

This thread was redundant with Kim's above; I've merged them down here. Chick Bowen 04:20, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

WTF was wrong with last year and the year before's nice unobtrusive progress bar? 209.77.205.2 04:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I assume it didn't, er, work the way we wanted it to? So we're calling in the big guns... I don't really have a problem with the increased effort (OK, a little, but I realise we do really need the cash) but it would just be nice if it were prettier 0:) ~ Riana ⁂ 04:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I would like to see a comparison between the number of donors from the first hour of each. I don't think assaulting people with incongruous colors, nonstandard fonts, a video with a closeup of Jimbo's makeup-free eyes that won't load because the same 18 MB are being served to a zillion other people -- and the flakey ogg viewer needs it faster or it freezes -- is nurturing more donors. 209.77.205.2 05:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Another option is using CSS named element opacity and CSS .hover. I made a quick proof-of-concept over yonder. For browsers that don't support CSS 'opacity' directives, it'll simply appear fully opaque. --slakr^\ talk / 04:46, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Why are we counting people who have donated and not funds raised? Surely the goal is in dollars, not number of donations, right? Squee23 07:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

This year, they've decided that the goal is number of donations. --Carnildo 07:28, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

And what, they are telling the employees that they get 12 paychecks but not any particular amount? Boggle. Squee23 09:01, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Furthermore, why are we showing about half non-English quotations to enwiki users? The fund raising banner is not on es, de, ja, etc. yet. Can't we filter to the site's language? Showing someone praise in a language they can't read defeats the purpose and looks unprofessional even if cosmopolitan. Squee23 09:00, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Position - Wouldn't it be better at the top of the page than between the tab row and the article? Because it has nothing to do with the individual articles and shouldn't be spatially inside them. Squee23 09:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

• I made this - Image:Giveit.jpg. I don't know if you would like to use it? Neil ☎ 12:50, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Why is there no dismiss option? Orderinchaos 13:25, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I needed that--I was expecting another beautifully drawn redesign and this one caught me completely off-guard. Elf | Talk 18:23, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Too grainy - it has jpeg compression artifacts. Wording is not bad though. :-) Carcharoth 22:48, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I came to WP this morning to look up an interstate highway article. I was met with a grotesque (sorry) orange box spewing random sentences in foreign languages, next to it an odd-looking photo with a big arrow obscuring it, and the highway infoboxes hosed. "Omigod, WP has been hacked horribly!" was my first thought. After a few minutes, I realized that the box and photo were in fact supposed to be there, and the spewing foreign phrases weren't "neener neener you're so hosed" but actually nice quotes about WP. The interstate infobox template being hosed was just a coincidence. So what I'm saying is--the infobox and video box are ugly and look like a bad hack. I like User:Kim Bruning's purple options at Image:Some Attempts at better sitenotice.png much better--it looks professionally done, it incorporates the graphic into the box, and it's not filled with foreign language items. Now, if we still wanted to include all those phrases in all those languages to show that WP isn't just an English-language resource (which actually I think is a good idea), there should be a little text to introduce it, like "Users worldwide praise wikipedia" or some such.

(And, P.S., I'm glad that I apparently missed the scrolling banner; it would probably have frozen my browser immediately.) Elf | Talk 18:23, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Current Banner

Here is a static copy of the ugly box, for working purposes. Dragons flight 18:34, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Help us spread knowledge worldwide. Donate to Wikipedia! "I'd be lost without Wiki!"
[Hide this message]

I think it's great that people are working on better designs, but I fear we'll have to live with the old one at least for a few days more. So as a quick fix maybe someone could produce a replacement for Image:Movie.png, e.g. a detail out of a frame of the video. Anything less blurry would be great, also for http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/5 . --Kurt Jansson 09:35, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Dragons flight's draft

We can call this my first draft. Dragons flight 19:34, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Does anyone know how well or poorly a periodically-changing message interacts with things like screen readers? --Carnildo 20:53, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I can't answer Carnildo's question. But I like this much better than the orange one shown above, although a bar showing how close we are to the goal is more informative than just a number. Elf | Talk 22:00, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

We offcially have no goal. The bar shown is set to something like 75,000, but if it actually got close to that I'm sure it would simply be rescaled. Dragons flight 22:02, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

The goal can be found here. --Avatar 12:41, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

It is unclear (especially given other comments in that thread) whether the top of the Fundraising bar corresponds to THE GOAL or just "a goal" for the sake of having a fundraising bar. The Fundraising FAQ continues to tell the world there is no official goal. Dragons flight 17:12, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

PS. Orange? I'd call the color #fdece5 more pink than orange. Dragons flight 22:29, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

It's one of those colors that shifts depending on your monitor's settings. By fiddling with the gamma correction and white point of my monitor, I can make the box be any color from a deep orange to white. --Carnildo 01:31, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Looks good. I don't really like the thumbnail of the video, and would prefer a different one, but that's my personal opinion, and should not be taken into account unless multiple users express the same view. Puchiko (talk • contribs • email) 21:36, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Prototype

I've made a working prototype for this design at [3].

In the interest of being adaptable to other languages, I used real text for all the textual items. The drawback is that this increases the code complexity and makes it more vulnerable to differences between different browsers. I've tested in on IE 7 and FireFox 2, but it would be nice to have other browsers take a look.

I'm not neccesarily wedded to this design and I think AmiDaniel's design has a lot of virtues as well. Dragons flight 08:09, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

It's a little disturbing the way the size changes when the quote does, but other than that, it looks good with Opera 9.23. --Carnildo 08:42, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree. I've added javascript to fix the comment line at the time it is loaded to the maximum of its starting width or 50% of the window width. That way people with wide screen settings can see the long comments, while smaller displays won't have to deal with flickering sizes. Dragons flight 23:03, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Looks good. The new version works well in Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Firefox. It's usable in Javascript-unaware text browsers like Links2 and Lynx, and in Firefox with NoScript. Someone else will have to test Safari and Internet Explorer, since I'm on a Linux-only system here. --Carnildo 01:23, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Kim's draft

Here's these too... --Kim Bruning 05:40, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

The problem with all three of those is that, at least to me, the image on the right looks like a half-assed attempt at drawing a bullseye. Does anyone have a better method of getting the idea of "Jimbo's video" across? --Carnildo 06:00, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, could we make a sitenotice using wikipe-tan? :-) --Kim Bruning 05:40, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I find photo next to the "salmon" ;) coloured box very odd indeed. I also thought the (bizarre, out of context) messages were vandalism. Quill 21:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Fundraiser banner design by Burntsauce

Wow, none of the suggested redesigns are any sort of an improvement at all. Here's my design idea:

Help us spread knowledge worldwide. Donate to Wikimedia!

Notice the lack of an annoying image banner? Yeah, me too. Burntsauce 20:20, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Better one:

Help us spread knowledge worldwide. Donate to Wikimedia!

Tom Sauce 20:33, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

The minimized version is bearable. Atropos 01:07, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I like your version best. How do I remove the annoying advert, without having to log on and click something in my account settings to remove it? 172.216.138.42 13:18, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Isn't it a little bit small? We need something that tells, and attracts, people more. ΚαροτΜαν 06:38, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

That is sort of the point of a fundraising drive. This message doesn't seem to be anything more than the message that's always in Anonnotice. I realize the current banner's horrid, but that's no excuse to reject the idea of any banner. AmiDaniel (talk) 18:25, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Designs of the past

Here are a few things we've come up with before:

• 2004
• 2005-06 (1)
• 2005-06 (2)
• 2005-06 (3)
• Dec 2006

Hope these are of some help. I personally thing something along these lines would be good -- with slightly different wording, and maybe a mild background. Modest, but visible. AmiDaniel (talk) 03:55, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks much for digging those out. Dragons flight 03:57, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

This one is about as ugly & big as the last one (though deliberately positioned to be less likely to interfere with right-aligned info like geo-coordinates). It's also, so far, slightly more successful (1,650 donations per day vs. 1,000 at roughly the same average amount -- mind, I'm comparing only the first days of the fundraiser). Of course we've grown, but from what I can quickly ascertain, it seems to be higher than our traffic growth, and we've also only just kicked in the other languages & projects.

Bigger, unfortunately, is better in this case -- we need something that grabs attention & generates enough interest to support our projects. A tiny banner won't do; that's what unregistered users normally see all the time, and it only nets about $40-$60K per month, which is not nearly enough.

Obviously this can be done in a much more aesthetic manner than the current banner. I'd almost be inclined to whip something up quickly, and it would almost certainly be better than what we have right now. But my hope is that maybe we'll get something much better if we wait for community submissions for a few days. But, if you do want to contribute something, consider that it'll have to be visible & obvious enough to generate attention, or you'll just be wasting your time and ours.--Eloquence* 05:37, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

AmiDaniel

Alright, an idea along these lines:

Please take a moment to view this personal appeal for donations from Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales or donate now.

"On just about every Google

search I do, Wiki is there, full of info."

Tax-deductibility of donations - How your donations will be used - Donate to Wikimedia

Obviously needs some clean-up (feel free to edit User:AmiDaniel/Sandbox2). Like the general idea? Basically, the progress bar and quotes non-marquee dealio are merged into one. (Here it's obviously just faked with a table, not actually implemented.) Should be technically quite feasible, though. AmiDaniel (talk) 05:10, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I quite like that, but I still think the exact no. of donations needs to be in there somewhere. How about:

Please take a moment to view this personal appeal for donations from Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales or donate now.

"On just about every Google

search I do, Wiki is there, full of info."

12345 donations so far!
Tax-deductibility of donations - How your donations will be used - Donate to Wikimedia

Unobtrusive, but nice to have there for reference. What do you think? ΚαροτΜαν 06:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

On my system, both sides of the green bar are wrapping into 2 lines. Try this:

"On just about every Google search I do, Wiki is there, full of info."

Dragons flight 08:28, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

That is awesome! How can you make it two lines high so the first line can say "%d people have donated to Wikipedia please join them"? I tried changing all the "14"s to "28"s but that didn't work. Publicola 12:50, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Both look fine to me -- I notice in your version you came us a bit more money :)). Pursuant to Erik's comments above, is this message too "unintrusive" or will it be attention-grabbing enough? Also, will its centered position conflict with the coordinate jazz of anything else? AmiDaniel (talk) 18:23, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't like the complicated header line:

Wikimedia Foundation 2007 Fundraiser

"On just about every Google search I do, Wiki is there, full of info."

How your donations will be used -Tax-deductibility of donations - Jimbo's appeal

How's that? Dragons flight 21:46, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Video

All I want to say is, we should fire whatever editor decided that several seconds into the video, there should be a tight closeup of Jimmy Wales' eyes. It makes him look like a serial killer and has surely cost Wikipedia several million donors. I'm not keen on the closeup of his wringing hands, either. Tempshill 16:52, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, we all know that. It would probably be possible for an intrepid video editor to fix it, e.g. by replacing the eye sequence with a shot of the planet, or the Wikimedia logo, or any of a million other things. Anyone up for it?--Eloquence* 18:12, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Them's fighting words. FWIW, according to Brion, the video cost exactly nothing to produce, and there is no "editor" to fire. (I think it was Brion who cut the video, but am by no means positive -- we fire him and we can watch the entire wiki collapse into a smoldering pile of dun :D) You're by all means welcome to re-edit the video. AmiDaniel (talk) 18:21, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

I talked to Brion and he wants to have a go at substituting the .. problematic .. sequences.--Eloquence* 18:44, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Alright, sounds good. AmiDaniel (talk) 18:50, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Hows this coming along? JoeSmack ^Talk 13:30, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

He had a go at it and made a prototype, but concluded it's overall too much work to do it properly & deploy it.--Eloquence* 19:11, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Wikipe-tan Ad

Cause Wikipe-tan is cute. Dragons flight 09:56, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't disagree, personally, but I think you just lost your carte blanche ^^;; :-P --Kim Bruning 21:01, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't necessarily think this is a good idea, especially since Wikipe-tan isn't really all that well known outside Wikipedia. But there were several requests for a Wikipe-tan ad, so I thought I'd whip something together quickly and include some other variations among the elements to give possibilities for discussion. Dragons flight 21:15, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Without the border, the funky font, and the shaded background, I would totally support this. Publicola 23:41, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

New mock-up

I'm working with a designer friend to create a more professional-looking & appealing version of the fundraising sitenotice ASAP. The main goals of this are:

• appeal to more serious, high-minded donors who expect a certain level of professionalism;
• design something more interesting to avoid "banner blindness";
• create something that's consistent in its messaging & aesthetic (also with regard to the landing pages it points to);
• maximize usability: it should be as easy as possible to figure out for the reader how to get to a donation form.

Meanwhile, Frank Schulenburg from the German chapter is redesigning the fundraising landing pages (specifically the donate.wikimedia.org page). What I've seen so far is awesome; Frank is a professional web designer and he knows how to create a site that's both appealing and cleanly functional. :-) We're trying to keep the design processes in sync with each other as much as possible.

I met today with the other designer, Jörg Petri, and we mainly spent time discussing what we want to accomplish with the notice, and trying to figure out a consistent "theme" to use in the design. Here's a very rough first mock-up of the design we came up with:

With numbers:

The basic fundraising theme is: We want to appeal to many people to help us change the world. Hence the notice should incorporate primarily visual and textual elements that relate to this basic theme, to give it an overall coherence.

We're taking out the video button -- instead, we hope that we can declutter the fundraising landing page enough so that it will contain the embedded video directly (i.e. there should only be a single landing page).

Let me explain a few more things, referencing the numbered elements.

1) Instead of a dumb thermometer, we'd like to have a "people bar", with the last person highlighted in some fashion to connect to the reader.

2) There's no particular reason not to make the number bigger (of course the number in the picture is ridiculous). That doesn't necessarily imply a fixed goal, only an emphasis on progress.

3) We very carefully picked this slogan because

• it appeals to the reader as a person;
• it invokes the known & trusted Wikipedia brand, so that the banner is not falsely perceived as alien (we might change this to Wikinews/whatever on other projects);
• it relates to Jimmy's video message: Imagine a world ...

4) In the final design, this will be a clearer "Donate now >>" button, which will use the same design as the one on the new landing page.

5) We haven't decided yet if we want the quotes to be "boxed" or not, it just might be enough to separate them with some whitespace & format them nicely.

6) Earth ties everything together: people, quotes, changing the world. We might use a Blue Marble photo from NASA or a stylized Earth for this.

Next steps & open issues:

Jörg is going to create a proper mock-up in PhotoShop hopefully by Tuesday, possibly slightly later. It will probably take another week to the final execution in HTML, and then a few more days to execution in PHP. I'm hoping for around November 9-15 for a deployment; this would still give it more than a month of impact.

Open issues:

• If we unexpectedly make very fast progress, we could consider some nice tweaks, such as not always showing the same side of the Earth -- random scripting things that should not be _super_-hard. Jörg might at least provide us with a few options for this.
• If we want to use consistent typography, we need the Wikimedia Font (Gill Sans IIRC), which is not going to be present on many users' systems. It might make sense to pre-render parts of the notice in images for a few languages. The hardest but probably best route would be to programmatically render dynamic text as images.

I'd appreciate comments & questions on the current mockup. :-)

--Eloquence* 02:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Out of all the redesign proposals so far, I have to say I like this the best. Cbrown1023 talk 03:27, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Dragons flight 16:57, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

For the record, the tongue is aimed at Eloquence's arrogant approach, and not at the sample directly above, which I rendered from the Jorg sketch. Dragons flight 01:22, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I very much like this one. --mav 01:01, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to see it look like it wasn't made with clipart in PowerPoint, though. - Mark 04:36, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

New Prototype

I've prepared a semi functional version of the above [4], tested in IE and Firefox (have I mentioned hating the CSS behavioral discrepancies between IE and Firefox).

The linked page also contains further links to the art files I have been using for anyone interested in trying to improve it (Mark?). I am opposed to including lots of gradients and raised borders, etc. just for the sake of having them, and prefer a simple layout more in keeping with Wikipedia's overall design. That said, adding an unobtrusive texture to the banner background and certain other highlights could be done in a tasteful way. Dragons flight 08:34, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Phase 2

Jörg is now working on graphical mock-ups; this is one of the first ones (the originals were gray/red, which I discouraged as being a little too industrial looking).

The next mock-ups will try to make the "people progress" more visible as such. Then we'll try to implement it as a scriptable thing, and we'll probably also do an HTML version for easier translation.--Eloquence* 14:16, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I like this one, but might the quotes be made a little larger? Cbrown1023 talk 02:16, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to see the quotes inside the frame, like in Dragons flight's proposed design. Putting them outside makes them harder to spot -- the large banner draws the eye away. --Carnildo 07:51, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree that they are rather hidden in this layout. The quotes are one of the more appealing aspects of this drive (good idea, whoever thought of that), and the potential to have a message appear there is likely to encourage donors. I don't have a strong opinion about outside vs. inside, but I certainly think more prominent is important. Dragons flight 18:04, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow -- looks great! Personally, I rather like having the quotes outside the frame; though they could be a bit larger and exclude the text "Donors like you have said ..." (it's not "donors" who have said this, but one "donor," and the viewer is most likely not a donor -- at least not yet). Otherwise, I'd say, the sooner we can get this (or a variant thereof) up, the better off we are! AmiDaniel (talk) 08:13, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Also, can we replace "Wikipedia" with "Wikimedia"? AmiDaniel (talk)

We'll probably try to get Wikipedia replaced with the current sitename, but if that's not possible, I'm sure it will be changed to Wikimedia. Cbrown1023 talk 15:15, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

It's the other way around -- the first priority is to get a version with the recognized Wikipedia brand name up, the second priority is to fiddle with the text for the smaller projects. But yeah, the quotes will be bigger, and will probably be rendered as text.--Eloquence* 16:43, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Is this version of the "people meter" intended to be dynamic or static? One of my general concerns with the current banner and this design is that there is little to indicate to the casual visitor that this is a fundraiser rather than a permanent plea for donations. Right now the donor bar sort of has that effect, but I would support something much more blatant like the text "2007 Wikimedia Fundraiser". Since we get far, far more income per day from fundraisers than during normal times of the year, I think an open inducement is helpful. Dragons flight 18:01, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

It's intended to be dynamic; we're looking into rendering the final version from SVG. A blatant text - maybe, but the banner is already quite big. The main thing that concerns me right now is that it looks too much like any other big ass banner .. maybe making the quotes more dynamic will help with that.--Eloquence*

Incidently, in my second draft above, I put "2007 Wikimedia Foundation Fundraiser" in the tooltip text that appears when one hovers over it. Perhaps not as good as actually saying it in the banner, but at least it puts it somewhere if one is having trouble finding a space for it. Also, I agree there is definitely a banner blindness issue, which is one of the reasons I was deliberately aiming for a cleaner (more wiki-esque, if you will) style in the above samples rather than a big, gradient fill box approach. Though a shaded box may be what people inevitably expect at this point. Dragons flight 19:13, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

On this note, David Strauss sent me over the code used to generate the "fundCORE meter" and said he'll likely put it up on cvs sometime soon. While I'm more than happy to try my wits at hacking away at it, I don't have any experience with Drupal and so would much prefer if we could either talk David into doing this (as he clearly has the best idea of how it's all put together) or if Erik or someone else would take it over. If you'd like me to work on it, then I'm going to need dimensions for the meter, the images used for the little dudes, and the exact text(s) we want in the meter and some translators. I would, however, advise against rendering the entire banner as an svg as many browsers (most notably, IE) have difficulty with transparency and vector images. Ideally, the banner (meter inclusive) should be rendered as html to be scalable and respect browser fonts and preferences. AmiDaniel (talk) 20:58, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Translation requests will be posted on meta:Fundraising 2007 and the Translators mailing list and done by the Meta-translators. Cbrown1023 talk 21:08, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate the offer for help. I think we got the technical side covered. The areas in which help will be most useful are, at this point: 1) translations, 2) general ideas to make all parts of the fundraising process more effective (including the notice).--Eloquence* 00:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Banner blindness is a really good point. Try to render to transparent and leave out the actual box ;-) --80.126.238.189 20:44, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Banner Effect History

I have taken the time to compare the donor rate (in number of donors, not monetary value) in this fundraiser versus that in the previous three fundraisers (2006, 2005 Q4 and 2005 Q3) based on donor records [5][6][7]. After normalizing for the growth in overall traffic to Wikimedia sites (as determined by Alexa), it is my conclusion that the current banner is the least successful of the designs that have been used to encourage donations during that time. The most successful in attracting donors appears to be the "Personal Appeal" banner adopted in the middle of the 2005 Q4 fundraiser [8]. Dragons flight 08:15, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

PS. I should say that I am assuming the main variable is the nature of the appeal. If the functionality of the donation form or the variety of donation methods has also changed substantially during this time, those would be confounding factors. Dragons flight 17:10, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Do you perchance have your spreadsheet or other notes you used to generate these conclusions? It seems to contradict Erik's statements above, so I'd be curious to see what you're basing it on. That's not to say I don't trust you -- personally, the current banner makes me not even want to read Wikipedia, let alone donate to it, whereas the 2005 banner, as I indicated above, was my favorite of them all. AmiDaniel (talk) 18:23, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

It's important to note the timing when those banners were present as well. The reason we're running the fundraiser into Christmas is that people will be more likely to donate at that time.--Eloquence* 19:09, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, people are more charitable at the very end of the year, but you'd have to bend over pretty far to also ignore the deficiencies of the ugly pink box and "terrorist" Wales. Adjusted for the change in site traffic, the 2005 Q3 fundraiser was also getting more donors then we are now. Dragons flight 22:16, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I like the little green bar filling up. I click "show more" every now and again to see what the latest design is. :-) I'm not sure that it is possible to come up with a "best" design, but hope you guys come up with something reasonable. I'm going to donate around Christmas time - as has been said above - people (including me) are more charitable then. I might also donate when it reaches 50,000 people. Is there a graph yet for how that number has been increasing over time? Carcharoth 13:24, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

You might also check what the contribution rate was while the CPU-eating banner was up at the start of this drive, compared to the rate after en: modifications. (SEWilco 15:53, 5 November 2007 (UTC))

Status update

Latest mockup

Brion is reworking the sitenotice code to get a dynamic version of the design to the right up and running ASAP. This latest design addresses the issue of "banner blindness" by removing the background.--Eloquence* 00:28, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Definitely more stylish than the current box, though I am dissappointed to see that the quotes are now gone. Also, having abstracted the banner down to so few elements, the large size of what remains looks somewhat bulky and overbearing in comparison to the wiki content. Lastly, after spending time looking through Fundraisers past, I am also somewhat skeptical that "to change the world" will have as effective and visceral an impact as say "Wikimedia needs your help in its US$75,000 fund drive" or "Please take a moment to read this personal appeal for donations from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales". Saying we need this money to actually exist feels a lot more moving than saying we need money to go do other things. Dragons flight 01:07, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

The quotes will be there, they're just not in the mock-up. Since it's vector graphics, we can play with the size a bit, but of course it should stand out a little. Re: the slogan, we can also tweak that, and see if we can get a difference in the daily totals. --Eloquence* 04:22, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry to say: The banner is just horrible

I came back to Wikipedia after about a month and I just would like to tell you that this is the first time I started to filter out something from the wikimedia.org domain. My first impression was am I on YouTube or something?. Maybe that's because I am using "standard" theme.  « Saper // @talk »  00:33, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I second that. I'm not exactly sure why such an ugly (AND HUGE) banner was needed. Is nobody able to design anything more pleasing to the eye? I'd be up for it, but well, I'm not in a clique on here. And that ridiculous corporate/evangelical tagline is hilarious!!! I can change world, really? Will Jesus reward me for planting a seed? Oh come on... And treating everybody like cattle who will be attracted to the biggest, shiniest object is retarded - is that the true spirit of Wikipedia? I think not. No donation from me, sorry. 141.123.115.3 13:22, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

New implementation problem

On IE 7, the "people meter" is cropping the word "You" just above the top of the "ou" so that nearly all of the top of the Y is hidden (looks better on Firefox, though it may be slightly cropped). Dragons flight 04:54, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Also, I think this implementation is at least 100 pixels too wide for the 6.5% of users using 800x600 screen resolutions. Dragons flight 05:14, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Maybe use CSS floats in a div instead of the larger tables, to collapse some of that whitespace? If that works, shrinking the red button might help too (why a button, anyway? just a link would work).

If you can't do that, changing the slogan to something less wide would help, since it's stretching the tables a bit (and is a bit generic and not exactly humble, anyway).

Is the hr meant to be below the quote instead of above? —AySz88\^-^ 05:39, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

While we're at it, can we please reduce the vertical size of the banner? In it's current form, it's about 140% the size of the old banner, which was already excessively high. A reduction in the font-size for the number and of the "You" as well as cutting the vertical space between the banner and the quotes and scootching it up a tad should help tremendously. AmiDaniel (talk) 07:45, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Also, the counter is stuck at 11,861 ... AmiDaniel (talk) 07:48, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Alright, most of the problems are now fixed (discussion thereof primarily on IRC and meta). A patch to fix the counter has yet to be synced, but will hopefully be shortly. AmiDaniel (talk) 11:32, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing things, AmiDaniel. With the current version, the "people bar" is downsized by the browser below its actual pixel size, which makes it look slightly ugly (the first two little people look like they have square heads for me). Are you able to fix this, too?--Eloquence* 14:03, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, actually, I'm more who broke it than who fixed it :) The original image is too large, and so we scaled it down a bit; since it's in a lossy format, it lost a few pixels during this downscaling, which caused the decapitation of the little dudes. What we really need is for the original image to be generated server-side in a smaller size than it is currently. In the meantime, I'll play with some various sizes to see if I can minimize the deformation. AmiDaniel (talk) 05:50, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Can you e-mail me at erik at wikimedia dot org? Brion sent me some info that may help with the resizing of the image.--Eloquence* 06:17, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Sent. AmiDaniel (talk) 08:04, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Is there a way to make the "people bar" more appealing to the general public? I don't mean it like trying to attract cattle as someone said before but stick figures might be somewhat generic (no offense meant to those who are working with it) how about making every figure a different siluette based on a person dressed on a certain country's cultural attire? just to reflect Wikipedia's worldwide scope. - Caribbean~H.Q. 15:20, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Is Wikipe (at top of this page) multicultural enough? A japanese manga-style beggar in french maid uniform with a western beggar's cup? (SEWilco 16:52, 7 November 2007 (UTC))

Major Bug

0 People have now donated... Conrad.Irwin 19:12, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

We've gotten a few comments like this, I've contact Brion and Cary about it. Thanks for reporting the bug, I hope it gets fixed soon! Cbrown1023 talk 20:41, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

This was apparently caused by a crash of donate.wikimedia.org, which is now back online. Props to Cary Bass who came up with a quick temp fix to the problem and avoided us much embarrassment, as well as to whoever finally resolved the server outage. AmiDaniel (talk) 03:38, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Whatever the temp fix was, perhaps the default value of zero could be replaced with the current value regularly, such as once a day, so it will be somewhat more correct than zero. Or have it fail to show nothing instead of zero. (SEWilco 04:11, 7 November 2007 (UTC))

Brion has implemented this now.--Eloquence* 16:38, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Exclamation Mark on donation header!!!!!!

Copied from WP:ANI -- lucasbfr ^talk 10:20, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

As much as i love you guys - "You can help Wikipedia change the world!" does not work. I would be appalled if i saw a sentence with one of those things (!) in an article. It's just too mad trot - like headlines in Trotskyist newspapers (see Posadist 4th. Can we get rid of this horrificness (is this a real word? <add exclamation mark for effect> !) before we drive people away with our dire attempt to solicit money and also try to educate people with our very very lame exclamation marks. Mike33 - t@lk 07:51, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

It's not article content, and it's not a newspaper headline. It's advertising, and exclamation points are a perfectly legitimate punctuation mark quite often used in advertising. (they're also often used in newspaper headlines, even in non-trotskyist ones) —Random832 13:45, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Fundraising Graphs

I have taken the time to make some graphs showing the progress of this fundraiser and its relationship to previous drives. See: Commons:Category:Wikimedia fundraising analysis. Dragons flight 03:09, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

It seems like this year is underperforming a bit... Are there any plans to try changing things in the banner at this point?

(To be honest, I still don't like the "Wikipedia is great, you can chip in!" tone. I'd think something more like "we need your help; won't you?" would be more appealing.) —AySz88\^-^ 03:54, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Donations button

This is not a design idea but a comment on the current design.

(copied from village pump technical)
It looks almost as though there is a button underneath the (writing at this point) "23,913 have donated" for no reason as the dark blue is almost disappearing into the very dark red. What a bad colour combination so shouldn't this be changed?

Simply south (talk) 22:52, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Minor nitpick (bidi issue)

On the RTL wikis (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi WP), at least in the version of Safari I'm using, the beginning quote of donation blurbs gets shoved onto the right of the phrase, and the ending period gets shoved onto the left. This is, of course, incorrect. This can be fixed by attaching left-to-right marks onto either side of the phrase (such as HTML &lrm;), though I'm not entirely familiar enough with RTL issues to know if this is appropriate for all platforms. -MissingNOOO 23:39, 28 November 2007 (UTC)