Bitcoin Forum

http://eckiller.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/9c91ca804d-wikipedianeedsyourmoney.jpg

Looks like it is the annual Wikipedia funding time :)


I know that the wikipedia community has not been very welcoming towards bitcoin (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=652.0) :( ...however maybe we (the bitcoin community) could try to get wikipedia to include a bitcoin donate address?

That would be an awesome irony, and how long cound they ignore Bitcoin once they are accepting donations in the currency themselves?

 :D

That remind me. I need to get to the CCC. We need to conquer more charities before we take on the Goliath that is Wikimedia.

CCC?  what is the CCC?  (I see a lot of google results)

The Chaos Computer Club.

It's just me that finds silly this reluctance of the wikimedia foundation against adding some ads?

These beg banners they put end up being more annoying than a small add would be, and I don't think it's nearly as effective.

I agree. Wikimedia has plenty of potential revenue opportunities that would not compromise the project's integrity. I doubt that Wikimedia could be completely self-sufficient, but I bet it could get by without any donation drives if it was managed correctly.

I don't like the way Wikimedia is run in general. In particular, Wales should be removed from any sort of leadership position -- he has a long history of making stupid decisions and bypassing his own (poorly-designed) rules.

I"ve been unfortunately far too involved with Wikimedia politics.  The structure of the Wikimedia Foundaion is one that certainly is stacked deliberately with people who share his philosophies, as Larry Sanger certainly can testify (who arguably is the legitimate title of "founder" of Wikipedia, not Jimmy Wales).  What Jimmy Wales offered was the initial server farm which supported Wikipedia at a time when you couldn't put something like that together easily without personally buying the equipment yourself and hiring electricians to run the wiring, including network support.

Of course many people don't want to admit that much of that was financed by the porn industry, which is particularly ironic given some of the prudish actions by Jimmy Wales of late.  He does try to brush quite a bit of his past away, and it doesn't quite square with his current squeeky clean public persona that seems to be present at the moment.  He deserves some kudos, but he also can cause a whole bunch of problems when he steps in and tries to act as a "god-king".  A good example of how there is huge push-back on his actions can be found on this page:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag)

If there ever was a peasant revolt among the Wikimedia user community, this is it.  It was also a successful coup-d'etat so far as it did ultimately strip Jimmy Wales of a number of significant abilities and drew a firm line in the sand past which this guy simply can't act.  Sort of like a Wikimedia version of the Magna Carta after a strange fashion where the powers of the king are now significantly limited.  I agree that he should be thanked for his service, and then told to move along.

Getting back to the main topic at hand, which is trying to persuade the Wikimedia Foundation to accept Bitcoins for donations.  Perhaps an open letter to the Wikimedia community would work out and they might be willing to accept donations like the EFF is doing.  If this is done, a very well formed letter could be put onto the Foundation-l mailing list, which is by far and away the best place for us ordinary serfs to communicate with the WMF board.  Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't, but I promise that there will be some significant feedback if it is done, mostly by nay sayers who love to shoot any proposal down.

In terms of historical examples, e-gold put some significant effort into trying to get the WMF to accept them as at least a donation option and bent over backwards to help out with the technical side of getting things integrated into the donation pages.  It was a little more complicated than simply displaying a bitcoins donation address, but not much more.  Other alternative currencies have come and gone over the years too, and it simply isn't a part of the WMF mission or the philosophy of those in power with the WMF to support alternative currencies.

I might be surprised as sometimes all it takes is to ask, and I would certainly be willing to post such a message created and formed here on this forum to make an open letter to the WMF and the Wikimedia community in general, certainly to give my personal endorsement.  I do have at least some pull so far as some credibility I've built up over the years, so it wouldn't be dismissed immediately if I made the request.  I can't make any promises and it does seem like a proposal that may get shot down, but it wouldn't hurt to at least try.

The most likely response is that there are plenty of ways to donate to the WMF, and that people should try to use those methods first.  Still, I know that some rather "unconventional" methods of donation have been used in the past, including the donation of several thousand shares of Google stock.  Of course that has real tangible value that doesn't need explaining.  It may also simply be premature to use Bitcoins for the WMF at the moment.  As a practical matter, it might be easier to persuade the Wal-Mart board of directors to use Bitcoins than the WMF board of trustees.  Where should we put that kind of effort?

RHorning: interesting musings. btw, have you been keeping up with citizendium at all (the 'alter-pedia' by larry sanger)?

as far as getting donations to the wmf in bitcoins... i figure it doesn't hurt to ask... pointing fingers at EFF may be a helpful bit of persuasion...

For me, the skillful execution of an idea is just as important, if not more important, than the idea itself. There is no shortage of ideas in the world. Most are never executed. I doubt Larry Sanger is the first human being ever to think of a collaborative encyclopedia. I think Wales deserves this title equally.

Larry Sanger certainly seems to resent Jimmy Wales. His attemps to defame Wikipedia were really childish and below the belt.  Seems like a bitter man; I kind of feel sorry for him.


Doesn't bother me in the least.


Understandable. Jimmy Wales is a libertarian in private but mainstream opinion isn't sympathetic towards libertarian values. As a public figure he needs to be careful not scare away big donors.

The Citizendium is all but dead as a community.  There are several issues involved there, and some interesting social dynamics that have been played out as a result too.  The funny or perhaps even ironic thing is that the Wikimedia Foundation is talking about hosting the Citizendium, as they seem to be running out of money in terms of being able to pay for their hosting service.  There seems to be some fairly widespread support for the idea.

A pledge drive like we did for the EFF might be worthwhile too, If you could say that the WMF could get the equivalent of $200 or $500 for doing a conversion of bitcoins to dollars, they might find it is worth the effort.  It is in those terms that the effort would be made.

A session at their annual congress in Berlin between Christmas and New Year would fit perfectly into their agenda, and spawn a lot of interest.  I was there last year, and it was packed with all kinds of hackers.  There is no better way to capture their interest.

Why ask when you can tell?  If "we" want to dictate terms for donations, we must ask first.  They already accept on their terms.

• respectable person makes new bitcoin address and advertises it
• donations roll in
• wait until the amount looks "significant", at the prevailing BTC/$ rate (some rules announced up front? into the fountain if the idea dies with less than $10 ?)
• (offer it to them in bitcoins first, if you like)
• sell BTC for $ and post it through their (virtual) letterbox with a note explaining
• publish here to maintain the warm fuzzies

It would be best to come from a united front on our side, but there's no way to enforce that.

Exactly how much effort WMF might be willing to put in & how often is likely to depend on demonstrating a cashflow.
(Unless it turns out they have an ideological objection.)

Can't come to Germany.

What an interesting idea! An edit doesn't get accepted unless at least 50% of the network accepts it.

Is that what this is? http://sourceforge.net/projects/wooki/

I remember the people from XWiki had a project for making it P2P. XWiki Concerto: http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/BlogFr/XWiki+Concerto

XWiki is a programmable wiki.

Yes! Thank you. Looks dead though  :-\

Do you think we can fire this thing up, and just start importing Wikipedia into it? I'll have to check with the developers...

Imho, p2p Wikipedia would definitely be much cheaper and better than the corporate monstrosity, which Wikimedia made it...

Here is the skoop, straight from one of the Wooki project managers:

"Wooki was a first attempt and is now discontinued. We are continuing with DSMW (http://dsmw.org) which is
integrated with semantic mediawiki. DSMW is much more mature, it runs on windows/linux/macosX.

Concerning Wikipedia, DSMW is an pure extension of mediawiki/Semantic mediawiki, so you can import Wikipedia data
within SMW/DSMW. But, IMHO there is two open issues : Scalability and collaborative editing model. You can
check http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25728/page2/, for more details on this topic."

Definitely sounds like something to explore, especially for the day when the Bitcoin wiki will be attacked... 8)

https://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Why-doesnt-Wikipedia-accept-Bitcoin-donations?srid=twa&share=1



So let me grasp this. Wikipedia wants funding. They don't sell a service that costs a fixed amount of USD, they do not have to pay a vendor a fixed amount in USD for something they sell in bitcoin. In reality, they have zero money in the 'fundraising account' when a fundraiser starts. If people donated bitcoins, these would be valuable to the foundation no matter if they were worth 1USD each or 200USD each. Since the total value of bitcoins Wikipedia posess equals zero, and the value of a bitcoin is likely to be non-zero, adding bitcoins to the 'fundraising account' of Wikipedia means that the 'fundraising account' will increase by a non-zero number, which would benefit Wikipedia and contribute to their continued operations. They would not even need to convert to USD, they could've used the bitcoins to pay for some services that they need to have online anyway, hosting, vpn's, graphic design and so on. How can Bitcoin be 'entirely unstable' ? It's been pretty stable for the last 4 years, except for one blockchain fork. When talking about the exchange rate, it's always over zero and how is not getting something worth more than zero interesting ?

It makes a huge financial sense to accept donations in such a format. I think he underestimates just how many geeks are into bitcoin, and how much we use wikipedia.

His arguments makes zero sense.

He would've been better off not answering at all or just say that management policy forbids it. Not making up stuff like this, I'm not sure he even believes in that himself...



The effort ? Is googling 5 mins a considerable effort ? I would think implementing and setting up a payment solution through BitPay would be rather straightforward as well. Too me, in reality what he says is that they do not want to accept bitcoins. That's fair enough - I just don't understand why people make up all these bullshit reasons, do they really believe in it themselves ?

Beggars can't be choosers, but Wikipedia didn't get the memo  :-\

Their stance only makes sense if they assume that people not able to donate bitcoins will then donate the corresponding amount in fiat.

The unstability is a complete non-issue as long as they convert their bitcoins to fiat on a regular basis, for example daily or weekly. They might get slightly more, or slightly less, but regardless it's free money for them so what's the problem?

I still love Wikipedia but they're just acting stupid here.

Let me see....

1. Going to wikipedia.
2. Get a big fat AD in my face asking for money.
3. Two huge fucing buttons to various centralized payment systems (Creditcard ord Payal) tucked in my face.
4. Hm. Clicks on other payment options.
5. Is presented with:
  A. Credit/debit card
  B. Paypal
  C. Monthly gift
  D. Check (via mail)
  E. Stock donation (wtf!)
  F. Bank transfer
  G. Legacy gift
  H. Matching gift
  I. Payroll deduction

Where's the bitcoin option??

 :P

(I know I know -- just wanted to point out the idiocy of people asking for money and accepting nearly anything but bitcoins, which is the best way to pay for anything online.)