Why You Should Donate to Wikipedia

As most of you know, I run a training company and believe strongly in the power of education to change the world.  Most of you also know that I'm not an academic, I'm a pragmatist.  Most academics do not think highly of Wikipedia, but I do.  I use Wikipedia all the time to find out basic information on many things.  I just donated to Wikipedia and I recommend you do too.  The people at Wikipedia sent me this thank you letter and asked me to share it, so I am.  The letter below gives you plenty of reasons why you should donate.  I hope you do.

Dear Steve,

You are so fantastic. THANK YOU for supporting the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Your donation covers not only your own costs of using Wikipedia, but also the costs of other Wikipedia readers.

Like the retired farmer in upstate New York who's using Wikipedia to study the science of sludge, and the student in Kuala Lumpur who's researching organic chemistry. The British mechanic who, after he broke his back in an accident, used Wikipedia to retrain himself as a web developer. The civil servant in Finland who set up an offline version of Wikipedia for a small school in Ghana. And the father in Mexico City who takes his little daughters to the museum on weekends, and uses Wikipedia to help them understand everything they're seeing there.

Wikipedia's job is to bring the sum total of all human knowledge to everyone around the world in their own language. That's a pretty audacious mission, but with 30 million articles and 287 languages, I'd say that thanks to you and people like you, we are getting there.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the half-a-billion other Wikipedia readers around the world: thank you. The fact that you are helping to pay the costs of running Wikipedia means it can stay ad-free and independent of bias, focused solely on helping its readers. Exactly as it should be.

You may have noticed that for the first time this year we've tweaked our fundraising so that most people will only see the banners a handful of times, instead of for weeks. That's deliberate: we don't want people to get irritated by too many appeals. But it does mean that fewer people will figure out we're a non-profit, and that we want their help. So if you're willing, I'd appreciate if you'd help spread the word by forwarding this e-mail to a few of your friends.

And I'd love if you'd try joining us in helping to write Wikipedia. Wikipedia's written entirely by volunteers -- tens of thousands of ordinary people around the world, exactly like us. If you see a typo or a small mistake on Wikipedia, please fix it. If you know anything worth adding, please add it. Some people find it remarkably satisfying, and maybe you will too.

Thank you again. I very much appreciate your trust in us, and I promise you: we will use your money carefully and well.

Thanks,
Sue

Sue Gardner
Executive Director,
Wikimedia Foundation
donate.wikimedia.org

Many employers will match employee contributions which doubles your donation: please check with your company to see if they have a corporate matching gift program. You can follow us on Twitter, identi.ca or Google+, like us on Facebook and read our blog. Here is the Wikimedia Foundation annual report for 2011-12, the Wikimedia Foundation annual plan for 2013-2014 and the Wikimedia Foundation’s five-year strategic plan. You can also now buy Wikipedia merchandise at shop.wikimedia.org.

Salesforce.com posts moving to blog.stonyp.com

Stony Point is growing and we have quite a few great instructors with knowledge to share.  We decided it would make sense to begin sharing it all in one place, so we created a new blog, blog.stonyp.com.  Going forward, I will post all my salesforce.com material to that blog.  This blog will be about my other company, Wasula.com.

Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant Exam Prep Class

I'm excited to announce that Stony Point has revised the Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant: Exam Preparation Class and published the workbook for the class on Amazon.com.

We increased the class from 2 days to 3 days, and we're now going to be offering it publicly in Orlando. You can register online on our website: http://schedule.stonyp.com/salesforce/classtype/SalesCloud.

I've delivered the class privately several times and it's now ready for prime time. I wrote the book, and I think that the book by itself would be enough to prepare an experienced consultant for the exam. I didn't give up everything I know in the book, but I do in the class. Three days is plenty of time for me to exhaust my knowledge.

Agile Methodology

I saw this on Dilbert.com and thought it was perfect to describe the Agile methodology.

Salesforce.com User Interface Settings - Part I

When I teach any Salesforce class, I always make it a point to go through all my recommendations for User Interface settings. Below is a screen shot of my recommendations. In my next post, I will explain why I recommend these settings.

Salesforce.com - What's the difference between Documents and Content

In my classes, I recommend that people stop using Documents and start using Salesforce Content. I go through a laundry list of reasons. I just received an email from a student who forgot the reasons, so I thought I would post them here.

I'm sure there are other reasons as well, these are simply the reasons I recommend Salesforce Content over Documents:

Feature	Documents	Salesforce Content
Full Text Indexing	Only the description of the document	The entire document
Document Versioning	No	Yes, automatic
Subscriptions	No	Yes, users can choose to subscribe to a piece of Content and will be notified automatically if the Content changes
Online Viewing	No	Yes, certain types of documents such as Word and Powerpoint presentations can be viewed online instead of having to be downloaded
Workspace Permissions	No. Folder security is universal. If you give everyone read only access, only the System Administrator can add and remove documents. If you give everyone read / write, everyone can add and remove documents	Yes. Can set up a single workspace and give individual users or groups of users different permissions to the same folder.
Ability to Deliver to a Customer	No, documents are internal.	Yes. Content can be delivered to a customer and you can also track if a customer actually views the content. You can also prevent the user from downloading the document and allow them to only view the document online.
Searchable	Only the description	The entire document is searchable

The Most Interesting Man in the World Also Writes Code

I have always loved these commercials, and I saw this posted in the kitchen at Model Metrics (www.modelmetrics.com) this week. I thought I would share it with those who like the Most Interesting Man in the World.

I also want to give a shout out to Carlos Cortes, the Most Interesting Consultant in the World.