Bitcoin Forum

  Well, for those that read, support or add content to Wiki it's that time of year again when they humbly ask for donations to keep the site operating.  I don't spend a whole lot of time there but would be more than willing to donate a few bits their way if they accepted them. I am going to write them about it and would encourage anyone else that is interested to do the same.

  Link to their request; https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=L11_1028_US3_Alan/en/US&utm_source=B_1028_US3_Alan1&utm_medium=sitenotice&utm_campaign=C_1028_US3&language=en
  Current Donation options;  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en
  Main Wikimedia Site; https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home


   Cheers,
      Derek


   Edit;   Please note: Wikimedia is not associated with WikiLeaks.

   Thanks. That would be very helpful. I am currently looking through all the different ways to communicate with them. I.e., email, forums, etc.

I'd give them coins if they accepted them...  Still might give them dollars, because I am a bit of a Wikipedia junkie.

Hey guys as you have started a thread about this I actually suggested this to them last month and I got the following response.

Note this was the UK branch of wikimedia.

+1 I would donate to Wikipedia MUCH MORE OFTEN if they accepted bitcoin. I just might drop a bitcent on every article I read!

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Contact_us

Maybe we should suggest bit-pay? As far as I know bit-pay is easy to integrate in websites and they don't have to deal with price fluctuation/money conversion so this could save some work for their staff.

This should be communicated to the US branch though because bit-pay only operates there.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Answers#Finance:_Why_does_the_Wikimedia_Foundation_not_currently_accept_Bitcoin.3F

The donator is still not traceable wit bit-pay. After all, the guberrmint doesn't want money laundering going on with those commie wiki folks.  ::)

That quote would seem to indicate that wikimedia and Maggie are uninformed.

While there is a risk in HOLDING bitcoins that isn't a requirement to accept them. There is absolutely no risk in them accepting bitcoins and immediately converting them to "trusted" (LOLZ) fiat currencies.

   Aye, think the problem is they neglected to run such an idea by their accountant.  He would have told them that they would only need to report the donation amount as, Pirce at conversion - cost to convert = net donation.....

The person writing this is a little mixed up. The US government does not back US dollars with its full faith and credit - it backs Treasury debt with its full faith and credit.

+1 barbarousrelic, though if the US government would ever need to actually pay Treasury bond holders with dollars, then it can simply issue more Treasury debt and tell the Federal Reserve to print dollars and buy this new debt, and use these devalued dollars to pay the bond holders. Without the ability to print new dollars it would be more meaningful to say that treasury debt is backed by full faith and credit, because this statement would mean that the debt holders get paid with money that has same value as the money they paid when they bought the debt bonds.

Ahahahah what an idiocy, then they should instantly stop accepting dollar, euro and what else  ::)

Also they could simply sell bitcoin for their loved dollars, why they don't do it?  ::)

full faith+fiat currency=EPIC FAIL

Oh well i won't donate anything to wikipedia. Their choice.

Just calm down, nobody is asking you to donate.
Understand this, as a organization they have their guidelines, sudden brainless decisions would cause them trouble and raise eyebrows where not needed.
Really, not appropriate to declare "idiocy" at those things not in line with ones wishes/expectations.

Peace.

It is a shame that Wikipedia are not willing/able to accept BTC directly.  I would certainly donate much more if they were able to accept them.  I would also be willing to provide contact information if they could not accept anonymous donations.

I'm glad they've taken the time to consider the possibility of accepting BTC.  Honestly though, the legal work involved for any organisation to start accepting BTC today is substantial and I feel it would be wiser for Wikipedia to wait for Bitcoin to settle down.  The work and risks should be taken by small upstart businesses looking for significant gains in the long term, not by a large and important charity.

I've written them an e-mail asking them to accept my bitcoin donation:


The more of you forum members at bitcointalk.org that write an e-mail to wikipedia and offer to
make a donation, the better it is.

I see some people are saying that it's difficult to implement and accept bitcoin donations? How so?

If I wanted to, I could give a laptop to Wikipedia, would it be any different than giving a small gold-bar,
some dollars in cash to a Wikipedia representative or bitcoins?

I would think an organization like Wikipedia first of all would be interested in actually getting funds so
they can continue their operation.

If I had a wallet of say 10 BTC on my computer, I'd be happy to donate say 0.1 BTC every time I read
a wikipedia article that really helps me in my work/research.

One could argue that if I really wanted to donate to Wikipedia I could use other methods, like PAYPAL
or VISA. Why would I? I'd be interested in supporting Wikipedia, and not VISA or PAYPAL, those
entities charge fees, which really is not necessary to pay.

Wikipedia could even store the recieved bitcoins and use them to pay contributors that does significant
contributions, or use it for other purposes, or exchange it to dollars or any other currency.

I don't know what they're afraid of ? That VISA and PAYPAL would cut them off ? That the government
would pressure them to stop accepting bitcoin donations?

Bitcoin is about freedom, freedom to handle your own money, and as far as I can see, wikipedia is all
about giving information and knowledge to the population.

I think those two things are quite connected.

If there really is a legal concern regarding not knowing the identity of the donor, they could still identify people eg through their credit card, while accepting the payment in bitcoin. Its a compromise I could live with.

I can imagine their stance, to be honest. They are interested, but don't want to throw a team of lawyers at it right now, rather waiting for someone else to do it.

Wikimedia always tries to remain a neutral stance. If at some point Bitcoin is attacked or declared illegal by some government, they absolutely do not want to get caught in the crossfire. If they are holding bitcoins at that point, that would force them into bitcoin's camp.

Honestly, it's not a surprise they are reluctant. I'm actually rather surprised they seem so open to it.

This can be solved in an instant by requiering the donor to fill in a email/name and phone number.
There you go. Not anonymous anymore.

So they mean that organizations that go out and ask for donations from people on the street should not take them because those people who give are anonymous? Are they kidding or do they not understand the foundation of independent organisations and donations?

It would be much better for them to get their money ONLY anonymously and here is why.

Case 1.

Lets say that google or apple would give them $millions for each year, during a few years.
That one or two single companies stand for 80% of their budget. They become dependent on these money since those are the money that payes their server costs etc.

Now this means they cannot mention any bad things about Apple/google/facebook, such as them using sweatshop workers or whatever because they now find themselves in a dependency situation.

Its almost like if Apple/google/facebook would bribe them.

Case 2

Even worse, lets say a mafia organisation or criminal individual gives them huge amounts of money non anonymously for a few years. Perhaps they dont even know yet that the person/organization is bad yet.

This buyes the mafia organisation good credibility and creates a dependency situation for wikipedia and associates them with this entity.
It also means that they can no longer take those well used money once this organisation is revealed to be a bad one and that their wikipedia name is dragged in the dust.

If they would they can no longer claim to be independent since they accepted/accepts donations from this entity.

What if Usama Bin Ladin was one of their biggest donators before or during the attack? How would that affect their brand?
Or lets say they were an old organization and Hitler was revealed to be one of their founding donators?

However if the donations was only given anonymously they could allways claim to be independent!
Since they would never know who give them money.

So another problem with not accepting anonymous money is that this acctually gives them the problem of having to turn down money from
certain organisations just to be able to claim that they are independent.

Acctually they should turn down money from non anonymous persons and companies etc just to be able to be trustworthy.
This means that they will get less money and be able to do less good. Not improving the world as much as they could.

This in fact is very important for a organization that wants to claim that we should trust their information to not be biased or censored.

So the truth is that its acctually way better for a independent media company to get anonymous donations, since this free them from any suspicion of dependency and links both now, in the future and in the past.
And it means that we can trust them to be as independent as possible and they are free to write what ever they want.

The fact is that they should preferably ONLY accept anonymous donations for the sake of independency.

I would say this.

Do not trust a media organisation that do not ONLY accept anonymous donations.

And if they still dont want anonymous money, they can simply ask for name and id number but they are not trustworthy anymore.

So this decision from wikipedia to not accept Bitcoins makes them not trustworthy anymore.

They cannot claim to be an independent trustable organisation until they only get anonymous donations such as Bitcoins or cash.

Good thinking. While you are it, allow only anonymous bitcoin donations for election campaigns. Anything else is just legalized bribing :)

I don't get this.

Use Bitpay.  Donators pay in Bitcoins.  They get paid instantly in USD (or whatever fiat they consider the least worthless).

They never gold a single Bitcoin for a single second. It would be like saying we can't accept Paypal because if Paypal is declared illegal we would be holding worthless Paypal bucks.

I don't even got a response from Wikipedia regarding my request to pay with bitcoins. I guess they do not want donations.

So what if they were caught in a legal 'crossfire' ? How on earth would anyone attack wikipedia as long as they honestly
reported all their income, even though this was in USD, BTC or in the form of a laptop ? What kind of legal troubles could
they possibly get?

What I think this is: Inertia

Anytime you suggest anything new to a company or a group, or even individuals, there's this negativity to embrace it, many
want to wait 'till larger companies' accept it, 'till it becomes more widespread', 'till it becomes more accepted' etc.

Thing is, we're all part of the change. If we just wait, nothings happens, someone somewhere needs to take the steps to
implement new things, new technology and new methods.

For instance, if my memory serves correct, hole cards for hotel doors was an scandinavian invention, but no hotel in scandinavia
wanted to test it out, they were all satisfied using keys.

Then the inventors went to america and did a test with some hotels, it worked great, and soon after the entire world used these
systems. They're now obsolete in most parts of the world, but you get the idea.

If wikipedia were to recieve 100K USD worth of bitcoins in one year, this would not be enough for any governmental entity to
take action against wikipedia.

My guess is that the people making the decisions are reluctant to change and reluctant to new technology. And wikipedia wants
to 'stay neutral'. How on earth can we know that they do stay neutral. What if some oil company pays them a few million dollars,
would that bide for 'neutrality' ?

Would wikipedia have honest trustworthy articles about that oil company and the doings of that company ?

Adding to the stubbornness and unwillingness to change and adapt is the fact that wikipedia does not want to accept advertisers.

It's a huge site, with lot's of customers. If they wanted to, they could hire a couple of persons full time that could run the PR-division,
these people could then develop a model for putting ads on wikimedia pages, and having clear guidelines and rules about what is
allowed to advertise for could help wikipedia financially.

For instance, when I do a search for London, there could be a few discreet commercials for hotels, flights, car rentals etc. The
companies would have to pay Wikipedia for commercial spots. Obviously this would have to be implemented in a smart way and
such that people did not start finding wikipedia annoying.

And for those that absolutely hate commercials, it could be possible to turn off the commercials with having a registered account
and ticking off that option.

When you have an insane amount of visitors to a web-site, you're unwilling and unable to monetize on it, and in addition you won't
accept donations because it's in some 'weird' currency, then I question is wikipedia is not undercutting their potential ?

  Maybe they finally got tried of responding or assumed it was all spam since it was in such a short timespan.? :/  Did anyone else not get a response back?


  Aye, this aspect of it makes me wonder as well. Of course, I am only vaguely familiar with all the guidlines regarding how non-profits are allowed to generate income. I certainly agree it undermines their potential. I am just not sure if it is an unwillingness to look at other options or if there are sincere legal hurdles that make such a prospect difficult to implement.

  I'm going to keep poking until I get an answer or someone more knowledgeable can attest to the difficulties or lack there of. If nothing else, knowing what road blocks are in the way of a non-profit utilizing Bitcoin donations will help the community in other endeavours.

  Cheers

I just resent my previous mail sent about a week ago, so I will see if I recieve an answer now.

If I ran a non-profit organization website, I sure would have accepted bitcoin or any other way
somebody wanted to support my organization.

Or they can accept Bitcoin, and instead of converting it to cash, use the funds to buy coffee via BitBrew http://bitbrew.net/, coffee for the office of which they're going to buy anyway using cash that was donated. http://bitbrew.net/ can even cut them the best deal possible without cutting into their profit margin. Everyone wins: Wikipedia get donations from Bitcoiners of which they may not be getting the old standard way; Bitcoiners may feel obligated to now donate to Wikipedia; Wikipedia's office has a coffee slush fund; http://bitbrew.net/ gets to sell more coffee; We continue to use Wikipedia, for it's growing with the help from our donations; Others see the Bitcoin option on Wikipedia and further investigate, possibly creating another Bitcoin convert; More organizations become keen on the idea of implementing the Bitcoin donation option to help pay for their coffee slush fund.

I recently wrote this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52543.msg628529#msg628529

To Wikipedia folks if you are reading this:

I use Wikipedia a lot and would/could/should donate, but I've had a couple of beefs over the years.  These are mostly associated with your editors sometimes being caught displaying personal motives which conflict with the free flow of balanced information.  The situation of Israel, and with naked short selling come to mind.

All the same, I use the service enough to support it (in spite of the laughable pathetic look on the Jimmy's face which graces each page.)  I don't give two shits about tax right-offs and I want to foster the use of Bitcoin.  The BS about Bitcoin taking to much effort is just that.  So, if you accept Bitcoin, I'll pony up some charitable giving on your behalf.

Couldn't the big, evil, bribe-happy company who donated bitcoins easily prove to wikipedia that they control the address that sent the money?
That could lead to wikipedia being just as controlled by donators, while being less open about it (since the Money donated by Evildyne Industries reveal would likely happen over the phone instead of through a semi-public non-BTC transaction).

This is a good point. All it boils down to is the integrity of the people running an organization, and then you again have the dilemma of funding. What if you need 1 million USD to operate for one year, and you've only collected 200K, then some big company offers to pay the remaining 800K. Will you accept that offer, and perhaps compromizing your integrity and neutrality, or will you reject the offer, and struggle to get other donators?

One possible way is to state explicitly that no amount of money offered will make you give the donator any special treatment, but then again, the whole point of donating huge sums of money are usually to achive some level of influence on the organization you donate to.

I believe there are genuine corporations and individuals that will donate larger sums, not expecting anything back, but more ofte I guess they do in fact expect something in return.

The interesting this about Bitcoin is although it can be anonymous it doesn't have to be.  Hypothetically wiki-leaks donations could be very public. Through use of Blockchain and requiring digital signatures (possible from a CA for amounts over say  500 BTC).  This would provide public insight into where the big money is coming from.

If the Microsoft articles all seem to have a pro-Microsoft slant and you can search block chain and digital signature lists and see Microsoft gave $2.5 M this year well you can put 2 and 2 together.

I'm not really understand a problem. If wikipedia do not accepts bitcoins directly, why not do it indirectly?

I propose experiment: I will send $5-$20 donations to wikipedia on your behalf. I will send them in advance, using your e-mail in correspondent field. When you will receive the receipt, you will transfer me appropriate amount of bitcoins. USD/BTC exchange rate is up to you. I shall be grateful for explanation how you calculate this rate.

So, all you need to do is to reply in this topic with following information:

• donation size (from $5 to $20)
• your e-mail (if you don't want to publish it, then send it by private message, but please provide the number of your post, so I can link your email with other donation information)
• exchange rate (anyone you feel be fair)
• explanations where you get exchange rate from (optionally, but I asking to provide it if it is not very hard for you)

You missed the point.  The point isn't about how to get money to them, there are already websites setup for that.  It's about getting them to take bitcoins.   

It's about them refusing our donations, makes no sense. You want to give them something and they refuse it, but meanwhile they ASK for donations...

I'm a bit disappointed at this. Wikipedia was a disruptive technology desperately trying to find ways to bootstrap itself, not even a decade ago. Back in 2004-2005 large organizations didn't take Wikipedia seriously just like Wikipedia doesn't take Bitcoin seriously now. Wikipedia also had to face their fair share of excrement being slung at them from the mainstream media, when they were new. They should know what it's like.  Why don't they give Bitcoin a chance? It isn't any more of a hassle accepting Bitcoin than accepting other non-monetary donations.  Ideologically, Bitcoin and Wikipedia are quite similar and could benefit each other tremendously. 

Legal requirements for being a registered charity exclude Bitcoin. Laws exclude Bitcoin.

it's the other way around, laws don't include bitcoin

Name the laws that specifically exclude bitcoin.  This is nothing but an assumption on part of Wikipedia.  An assumption that goes against its own philosophy: "be bold".

As far as I can tell, it is not illegal for a charity to accept any valuable as a donation that isn't fiat money, as long as the charity declares it.

Also, laws differ from country to country.  WMF has 38 local chapters. Perhaps we should try our luck with those?

Not at all.  Laws may (possibly) forbid or make it hard to claim a tax deduction of money given via bitcoin but not make it illegal to accept bitcoin.  If wikipedia is willing to accept it, someone could give them a house, a VHS copy of TJ Hooker,  something virtual or even a commitment of work. 

This is exactly what I was trying to point out. How the hell were you able to do it with fewer words?  ;)

In most countries there are definitely no legal issues with Bitcoin. I'm starting a company with various Bitcoin-related services, based in Finland, and I actually had to ask about this. I made an enquiry to the Finnish financial supervisory authority and they said to me, in very clear Finnish, that bitcoins are not money. From their perspective bitcoins are simply computational units, a virtual commodity. So not only is it not illegal, the financial authorities do not even care. They said it's "not our jurisdiction".

This could obviously change and we've seen exchanges struggle with banks. My next challenge is to get a bank account in Finland that'll be stable. I will explain to them my intentions completely from the start so there are no surprises. Hopefully I will not run into any major obstacles.

I'm curious in reading past articles about Wikipedia seeking funding during their early stage. Do any exist and where? I'm guessing there was a time when they were struggling financially and would have welcomed any type of funding tossed their way.

Them saying 'thanks, but no thanks' in having Bitcoin donations help augment their $14,490,000 contribution fund (pdf source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/AR_web_all-spreads_24mar11_72_FINAL.pdf), still sits ill with me.

They openly welcome a $1.00 donation via PayPal, of which they recognize only $.67 after PayPal takes their cut. Yet they don't want to even find a way around not accepting Bitcoin with virtually no fee, a fee that may be arranged to equal 0%.

They keep this up, I'll just dust off my almost complete set of Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia, and refrain from using their site or, at the very least, falsely claim to not use them.

I think this is definitely the time for Wikipedia to start accepting bitcoins. If enough people contact them about this, maybe they will realize the amount of money they are losing every day as a result of this decision.

How about a bitbrew coffee pack to be sent directly to Jimmy Wales - along with a letter, preferably titled:
"A Community Appeal to Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales"

(see this post regarding the bitcoin gift pack idea: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53986.msg650430#msg650430)

We could hash out a short letter here I guess. (I don't know how familiar we should assume Jimmy is with Bitcoin)
The letter should explain that we believe Bitcoin is a potentially important system for charities everywhere because it allows small payments.

We should also mention the wikipedia ad which read: "If everyone reading this donated $1, our fundraiser would end today. Please donate to keep Wikipedia free"
Now that there is a technology which allows just this sort of donation - they reject it??  Could we have donated $1 each without some intermediary slurping up a huge fraction of it before bitcoin? I don't think so.


I'll throw 1BTC in for that.  Any interest?

Sweet :D I'll probably join in just because of this nice title :P

(as someone who was involved in WP fundraising a long time back, I guess I can comment)

There never really was such a time. Wikipedia has long had a razor focus on operating efficiently as possible, made extensive use of volunteer resources (even for sysadmin stuff, legal stuff, etc). At its inception Jimmy funded it out of pocket with the help of friends, but it wasn't very costly to operate when there was no traffic. :)

Six years ago Wikimedia had ~2 actual full-time employees (and they weren't paid much, at that— as they were just ex-volunteers). As the site has grown, costs have increased tremendously, but not linearly— but as Wikipedia has grown fundraising potential has grown too (though also not linearly).

Even way back in the old days Wikimedia would turn away 'support' that appeared to have compromising strings attached, people wanting feeds of private user data, etc. It's been very fortunate that it's never had to make the hard decisions.  Though back then there used to be a lot of speculation about what would happen if the money ran short— would we run ads to stay afloat?   Now adays, that prospect seems so unlikely that people in the organization can say things like "if our funding were to vanish, it means we are failing our mission. Public funding is an important check on our performance.".  (Easy to say when you're sure it won't happen!).

I think Wikimedia would accept Bitcoin today, except there is at least one important staff member who's fallen _hard_ for the "bitcoin is a ponzi scheme meme" (google erik moller bitcoin)— and there isn't any great justification for bitcoin for them enough to overcome that bias... after all, looking at what the EFF, FSF, and Internet archive have received... we're probably only talking about a couple thousand dollars in support from bitcoin compared to the costs of dealing with the logistics, a small risk of negative PR. It would really only be majorly worth doing for the sake of supporting something new and innovative.

I think that as time goes on, and bitcoin proves itself to be a painless and worthwhile fundraising source for other orgs that wikimedia listens to (E.g. the FSF and Internet Archive) then they'll probably come around.

+1. Nice post.

+1 :)

  I agree, between Julz suggestion and what Gmax said. I think if we can't change their mind we can atleast appeal to their 'heart'. I'll pledge 1 BTC to a Wiki gift.

  In light of this and the recent Archive idea of sending a gift. Should we be handling this through the Bitcoin100?  I'm just not sure if it would add too many different options ont he plate of the Bitcoin 100. Anyone elses thoughts?

  Cheers

Why do they need money in the first place?

I mean, it seems to me that they don't do any effort to decentralize the whole thing, so that computing and storage essources would be provided by users.

Somehow, I think it might be a good thing if the Wikimedia fundation could go bankroute. After all, the encyclopedy would not vanish. It's free so anyone could save it by just downloading it (I have a copy on my laptop with a CGI script to consult it and it works fine).

Once Wikimedia goes down, it would be a big incentive for other organizations to continue the project with other, fresh ideas.

Wikipedia accepting Bitcoin donations would be so big, that we should pressure them constantly. Not to the point of being an annoyance, but anyway. I sent an email to Wikimedia independently a few weeks ago regarding this issue and I didn't even get an answer. But they will take notice if we pressure them continuously and now that the Internet Archive started accepting donations from us, we should also point that out in every email.

I like the idea of the BitBrew coffee pack. We should create a proper letter together and then put the names of everyone supporting this effort to the letter as well so it's clear that it is from the community. That could help and we could do it fairly easily.

The whole idea of them accepting small donations via PayPal seems absolutely ridiculous when you think of how cheap it would be using Bitcoin. I think they will eventually understand it, but we should do our best to help them understand.

There are many virtues to decentralization,  but reducing operating costs and improving performance (assuming equal costs) are not really among them.  Some things appear to do so, but only because they are externalizing costs (e.g. shifting costs onto the most expensive last mile ISP paths, which is only 'cheaper' due to unsustainable all you can eat pricing, resulting in blocking/rate limiting, or hosting things on stolen resources).

Wikipedia costs a fair amount to operate, but only because it's so widely used. It comes down to something less than $0.05/yr per monthly visitor (actually more like, 0.02 but wikimedia is spending more than strictly necessary in order to develop new software and increase Wikipedia's usage around the world). The challenge for Wikimedia is that most of their visitors don't donate at all, and payment processing overheads would make operating on 400 million 5 cent payments still insufficient.

I use to argue that decentralizing Wikipedia (while retaining the property of having a single coherent website people could browse, rather than e.g. a forest of never updated forks, preserving user privacy, etc) was actually impossible, but the bitcoin distributed algorithm disproves that.  That said, many people complain about the time it takes to sync a full bitcoin node, it would be far worse with 400 gigabytes of article history and 12 TB of image data. So even ignoring the fact that it would cost more in total to operate it's not easy, and the required technology simply hasn't been built.

Of course, you can go to download.wikimedia.org, and pull a static dump and serve it up via a CGI and people do, but that isn't the same as decentralizing the sites— it's not getting the hundreds of updates per second, it's not providing a single, coherent, usable, and reliable view of the site. The prior attempts (for which there have been many) have all been laughable.

I'm sure if some bitcoiner wanted to build the technology to enable this they could find many patrons in the bitcoin and Wikipedia communities to sponsor their work. Sadly, it seems that on this subject most people are all talk.

Well, Terabytes of data are exchanged every day in P2P file exchange systems,
and yet I have never heard of any donation campaign for them.


First, I want to say that I love Wikipedia. I contribute on the french site, I donated about 10EUR few years ago as I think it is the best thing that came up from Internet.

However, I will NEVER ever donate anything again. Because there are two many things I don't like with this project. For instance, there are several Wikipedia editing rules I just don't agree with. That's one problem with centralization: you must agree with the whole package or go away. If you don't agree with one part, you can't use the whole thing.

I also don't consider storing pictures to be important for an encyclopedy. And yet I assume this is one of the big cost for wikimedia. So I may accept to donate to "wikipedia", but certainly not to "wikimedia". Unfortunately, the wikipedia project is not separable from the wikimedia project.


What is wrong with diversity??? There is no reason why there should be a *single* encyclopedic wiki. An encyclopedy could have a "editorial line". There would be nothing wrong with that. On the contrary.

In Eric Raymond's metaphor, Wikipedia moves much more toward a "Cathedral" than a "Bazaar". And that's the main thing I don't like with this project.


Yeah that why I think we should not fund old technologies with charity, so that people can have an incentive to imagine better technology.


reliable:   ok
usable:      ok
coherent:   ok
single:      WTF????


Wait a bit. Some people will create a decentralized collaborative encyclopedy. But it sure won't help if people continue to support and fund wikimedia.

I'm in for 1BTC.

Interesting.  Surely everyone reading that page donating $1 would be a horribly inefficient way of raising funds.  I guess they are just trying to make a point about how little they need to keep running.

Personally, I would be much more interested in a letter which asked Wikipedia to give their thoughts on Bitcoin rather than to promote Bitcoin and extol its virtues:
  Perhaps the main problem is the natural anonymity Bitcoin affords.  Is there a framework which would allow them to require contact information with each donation?
  Perhaps the main problem is simply the small size of the Bitcoin community.  It may cost Wikipedia more to sort out the legal side of things than they could expect to receive from the community.  In this case, how much promised wealth would it take for Wikipedia to formally begin to accept Bitcoin donations?  If they consider and decide that, for 2500 BTC say, they would have sufficient incentive to establish Bitcoin as a proper alternative donation method then the ball is back in our court.

If anybody wants to take a lead in this idea, go ahead, and I'll somehow incorporate in the Bitcoin100 doings. We'll make sure it gets as much full support as we can muster up.

~ ~~~~~~~~

Another angle I just though of. Remember all those volunteers that directly support Wikipedia? Those unpaid volunteers? In essence, is Jimmy saying, "I got mine. Screw yours!" What if every volunteer received only 1 BTC? Sure, at today's rate, it's crumbs. At tomorrow's rate, it may be $10,000 USD. Either way, it's a hell of lot more than what they're getting now. Therefore, what if those same volunteers specifically asked that all Bitcoin donations would belong to them. The pressure would no longer be from the Bitcoin community, but from within. It'll be pretty hard for Jimmy to say no to them, for they're the true backbone of the organization. It would be like him saying, "No! You will continue to offer up your services for free. And love it!" Puts a completely different spin on the whole thing now, doesn't it?

~Bruno~

  That is a very interesting idea to expand on. It is curious why there is no predefined option to 'donate to this contributor' embedded into the content templates. It would be pretty friggin awesome to have a 'Donate a Bitcent or two to this contributor' button on each of their entry pages. Of course, a contributor could make the choice of having one or not. Or even be allowed further control to place an 'If you found this entry useful and wish to show your appreciation for the contributor,' 'Donate a few Bitcents to xyz charity' button in their name.

  I hate helping to add to ideas and not really being in a position to take much action on it. :/ If I ever get my current project ironed out, I will free up enough of my time to do more of the things needed for the recent ideas I have been trying to contribute to. For now, I can offer my apologies. And hope that someone can grab these up and expand on them and move them forward.

  Cheers

You did more than enough, simply by adding to my idea. It didn't occur to me that the volunteers could just start adding text like you stated onto the pages you've outlined. Moreover, as a group, I'm willing to bet they rap with each other, as we do, either on a forum or elsewhere. Imagine if they were made aware of a potential income stream for them, but it was being nixed by the higher-ups.

Imagine, further, if there was a Facebook page bringing this revelation to their attention. I'm just imagining here!

~Bruno~

Good news, on this front.

Wikimedia NYC, a non-profit regional support organization for Wikipedia/Wikimedia has started accepting bitcoin donations: https://nyc.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donate (https://nyc.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donate)

Wikimedia has chapters all over the world that serve to organize regional efforts. In some countries there are tax advantages vs donating to Wikimedia itself (though, obviously not for a US chapter), but chapters primarily serve to organize the offline efforts of Wikimedians to reach out to the greater world around them— collaborating with schools, libraries, and museums.   

Wikimedia NYC is one of the larger and more productive chapters, especially considering that it's one of the younger ones. More info at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_New_York_City (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_New_York_City)

WM NYC runs workshops to teach people to edit wikipedia, they run an annual wikipedia conference in NY which is open to the public, and have run big highly productive initiatives to improve Wikipedia's coverage (both in articles and in illustrations). Their outreach both increases the depth of Wikipedia coverage, and breadth by helping people who aren't computer geeks to contribute.  Donations to Wikimedia NYC directly support these efforts.

I'm not personally a part of WM NYC, but I've worked with them on some of their projects in the past and sometimes visit to their meetings (or at least if you go through their meeting archives you can find pictures of me, though I live down in DC so I don't make it there too often).  So I can say with a least a bit of direct experience, but without personal bias, that they're an organization worth funding.  Moreover,  success with their bitcoin donations may encourage other chapters and Wikimedia itself to accept donations in bitcoin.

Cheers.

Why are these sites different?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_New_York_City

http://nyc.wikimedia.org/wiki/Home

One is the older Wikimedia New York City chapter page page on Wikimedia meta wiki— it's a wiki setup for all the wikimedia sausage making stuff (thus 'meta').

Nyc.wikimedia.org is a separate wiki setup for the chapter earlier this year.  They're apparently migrating stuff from one to the other slowly over time. The front page there points this out (and the page at meta.wikimedia.org also links to nyc.wikimedia.org).

@Gmax, that's pretty groovy stuff. Thanks for sharing.

That is awesome news.  Blogged!  (http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2011/12/nyc-chapter-of-wikimedia-foundation-now.html)

Thank you kindly, gmaxwell, for clearing that up for me. I simply thought that it looked weird and needed a trusted opinion.

On that note, this is great news. At first, we had Jimmy saying no. Then the other idea of organizing the editors was shut down with a valid reason. Now we have Wikimedia NYC accepting Bitcoin on its own accord. And how many other chapters are there? And what's the likelihood of having all of them accept Bitcoin as a donation option? And who's in charge of trying to make sure that this comes to pass? And what are we waiting for?

~Bruno~

It seems all of them share the same email for addressing issues/suggestions with donating. That is problemsdonating@wikimedia.org

Thanks, D. Noted!


Nice little write-up with that blog post, GoWest.

I've just donated to Wikimedia NYC. When it shows up in a few minutes, they should have an extra 1.23456789 BTC.  ;D (I just had to be different!)

~Bruno~

The decisions of the chapters are up to the chapters.  They may each have their own personnel issues (e.g. lack of an available trusted party to handle the digital donations), interpretations of local laws, hunger for funding, etc.

The list of chapters is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters).

It's worth noting that not all chapters are equal.  Some are large and active, some are new, inexperienced, and some are mostly idle.   Some are not actively soliciting donations because they don't have the organizational maturity to handle them (and just get grants from Wikimedia to run projects that cost money), etc.

Off the top of my head: Some of the larger and more active chapters are Germany, Netherlands, France, Israel, Australia, Italy, UK, and Argentina.

My gut impression is that Germany won't care much (they are by far the largest chapter, and have a lot of income already) and that UK will blow you off with bitcoin-is-bad+wacko-law-interpretations.  Best bet is contacting a chapter near you or ones associated with languages that you speak.   Since chapters have a regional (and often language specific) focus, people closer to the chapter are in a better position to interact with and evaluate them.

Wikimedia (washington) DC is a new, smaller chapter that was just recently formed. It has a lot of cultural overlap with the NY chapter so it might be receptive too.

I feel kinda silly for not suggesting trying to get the chapters to take bitcoin before... in general its a pretty good fit: as smaller organizations the chapters can be a little more agile... and if one or another is infected with the bitcoin-is-bad meme there are others to try.  The ones who will accept it get the benefit. :)  And it will build up a base of experience with accepting bitcoin donations within the Wikimedia family.

Thank you kindly, gmaxwll, for taking your valuable time in enlightening us on the status of the various chapters.

I have a question that's slightly off topic, so forgive me. Are there another organizations we are missing that are based on a similar structure, ones that may be a perfect fit in accepting Bitcoin donations? Ones that where the main body would reject Bitcoin, but the sub units are able to accept Bitcoin donations as we've just witnessed with Wikipedia/Wikimedia NYC. If so, name them. (sorry if this is unclear, for I'm a tad tired but felt it important enough to get it out there while fresh in mind)

~Bruno~

Perhaps this will turn out like when you were a kid and there was that new toy in town, but nobody wanted it until the moment one of your friends got one, at which point everyone had to have it. That's how I hope it turns out, anyway.

Nice work.

There are lots of non-profits that have a chapters model something like this.  The first that pops into my mind is the ACLU.  Though... I'm not an expert on that. Certainly it would be a useful tactic to use elsewhere.

I love the fact that Wikipedia is making us scheme to donate to them.
:D

They misspelled "through".
Still donated 1BTC anyway.

I've been trying to get Amnesty International to accept bitcoin. They have chapters in nearly every country. Considering they deal with issues in tyrannical societies, I would think bitcoin a good fit. Any suggestions?

Not to be a smart ass, but keep trying. I would suggest next sending a modified version of the letter that Derek with Bitcoin100 sent to St. Jude.

You guys should certainly stop doing that.  Harceling people about bitcoin
gives the worst possible image of the community.

Bitcoin doesn't need such methods to succeed.

Wikimedia chapters? This remind me something... but i don't remember what... oh well anyway, FOR THE EMPEROR  ;D

yeah but some small pushes can do any wrong. A small chick does the same when trying to hatch from it's egg  ;)

I would agree, if, we were actually hassling anyone. I sent one email to 2 different Wiki addresses that basicly said, 'Hey, I'd like to donate to you. Do you take bitcoins?' And our bitcoin100 list is designed to be very unannoying by sending one letter, to only one charity so far, in order to represent a group of people versus everyone just spamming them.

It is no more annoying than someone who would have mailed any charity on earth over the last 10 years that asked, "Hey, I'd like to donate. Will you accept paypal?"

p.s. Is harceling French?


cheers

I sent a message to Flattr, one of the most used blog tipping services, to start accepting bitcoin, and I got this reply (https://flattr.com/support/messages/view/id/4816):


If we had a service that took bitcoin and instantly converted it to paypal, we could get the really big companies onboard.  It would be counter-productive because it is giving money to paypal, but it would help the community take notice to bitcoin.  Maybe make a service where the bitcoin is converted into USD or other physical currency and snail-mailed?  I dunno, but Eclipse Mining Consortium (https://eclipsemc.com/) has a cool auto-payout feature to Paypal and it would be cool if someone had a similar site that could pay out just as easily.  

bitinstant.com comes to mind, i haven't personally used their service but remember seeing them offer methods to do BTC>Paypal, it is not free obviously.

That's what I'm talking about! What an interesting idea! Post it on their forum, thus initiating a dialog about Bitcoin. Now take a page from what we've just learned and apply it to other organizations that have a forum set up. Rinse and repeat!

~Bruno~

Good job wcoenen!!  That's a huge step in the right direction!

I wish there was a button I could click now to help, I guess we wait and email other organizations.

Have you seen Wikipedia's new header?

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7008/6604465257_a9fc6dd66a_b.jpg

I find it odd on two counts. First, it came out after our initial request to embed a Bitcoin donation option. (maybe not so odd) Second, they wouldn't have put this up if they didn't feel they needed it. I'm guessing their normal donation rate is a tad off to date.

I was reading Wikipedia's donation FAQ and found this strange:

- https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_is_there_a_minimum_donation.3F (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en#Why_is_there_a_minimum_donation.3F)

I mean, other than a potentially low credit limit, what incentive does the thief have for conserving the funds of a stolen credit card? (Edit: I can possibly see it with cloned cards, but a charge of $1.05 is not going to be more obvious than a charge of $0.25.)

Why don't they  just admit that fixed credit card fees become cost-prohibitive for such small donations?

The talk page of that Article has been deleted, so I have no way of knowing if it has been brought up before.

That does sound like a BS, cop out answer. But, are there fixed fees for non profit CC transactions? I thought ti was a set % of the transacted amount..?

I mean, if you are correct, it would be like the CC processors are soem kind of Mafia. And people are afraid to speak at all negatively about them. Though, even with what they are stating, that is pretty f'd up. The CC processors are able to tell them that Wiki can't accept small amounts because of fraud?

In any light, its another good reason for them to accept bitcoins...

cheers

Fees are usually $[flat amount based on how many transactions you do per month] + a % of transaction.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/29/wikipedia-accepts-enemies-of-the-internet-currencies/

IT would be interesting if someone did the following:

First hundreds of persons contribute to write e-mail templates asking wikimedia to accept bitcoin. Then someone makes a script or a program that shuffles these messages and sends a couple of them at random intervals every hour every day, perhaps even make random bursts of them too. Receiving hundreds of e-mails from different e-mail addresses and different domains every week about bitcoin, should possibly have some impact?

Another thing that would be possible was to set up a donation page, must be done by a very trusted forum member, and then just collecting funds for wikipedia. Then sending them an e-mail every week notifying them about their balance and how much is outstanding.

Perhaps an even more effective approach would be if somebody sensible and good 'sales person' would be able to speak to the right persons in wikipedia in person.

Arguments like freedom, 'anonymity' etc should be used to further our case.

I don't think an automated emailbot is a good idea, and quite likely to backfire on this community's reputation if they find out what's going on.  However your proposal to have someone set up a fund to gather Bitcoin donations on their behalf is absolutely brilliant.  Money talks.  The more their balance grows, the less they can ignore it.

I was recently looking something up on wikipedia.

Then again, I saw this message, asking for money.

I went to their checkout procedure.

It said:

 - PayPal
- MasterCard
- Visa
- American Express

I wrote them an e-mail and said I liked their project and wanted to donate, I will however not do business through an evil company like PayPal, I have boycotted them for years. Every internet service that ask me to pay through PayPal receives no business from me.

Also, I readily told them I was not interested in enriching any of the CC-companies with fees associated with my donation.

I told them I would donate bitcoins, so I asked for their bitcoin address.

They simply stated they don't accept bitcoins, and that was that. What morons. If I ran a site and I asked for money, I would accept virtually anything people would give me. Also wikipedia is all about bringing education and knowledge to the larger population, ie. free open access to knowledge. Then they should also embrace bitcoin as it's the bleeding edge of finance, and aiding in giving indivuduals their freedom back.

If I ever see Jimmy Vales (did I get the name right ?), I will slap him with a wet trout and yell: "Bitcoin!"

Can anyone remind me why noone has made a bitcoin-friendly fork of Wikipedia already?

It's quite the undertaking, and why split such a wonderful project. They will accept bitcoin eventually, when everyone else does. Duh..

Does anyone on the forum know anyone in the committee that runs Wikipedia?

If so, maybe they could ask that bitcoin be accepted for donations...

I think that would be the best way to go about it. Why not invite the founder of wikipedia to the bitcoin conference, then he can shake hands with important bitcoin people. Win win for everyone.

I think the bitcoin conference should make it a point to give invitations to important people that can help propell bitcoin forward.

Sure.  Inviting him could not hurt.  But I'm pretty sure he'll decline politely.

Come on guys, let's face it.  If we want Wikipedia to accept bitcoin donations, it's much more for bitcoin than for Wikipedia.  You know it would be a big advertisement for bitcoin.  We can't be partial about this.

Here's the email address where you can suggest bitcoin payments: donate@wikimedia.org

That's right. But I think Wikipedia has the same spirit as Bitcoin. If it wasn't as big as it is right now, then they would probably be more interested. Another way to go about it would be to invite someone a bit further down the wikipedia food chain to the conference as well. If they see bitcoin is great, they can influence the right people in wikipedia.

"to protect our independence we'll never run ads"

How can a company or organization be truly independent if it doesn't even accept a form of money that is more independent than all the others they accept? Hypocrites.

Just send them a donation via the email function on blockchain or coinbase or coinapult even.. Then it's up to them to claim it, or let it expire and be returned to them. I really wonder if they'll let money they received just slip back away from them.  :D ::)

Is there any difference in me asking you to give me your btc adress so I can give you some money and simply just e-mailing you a link saying, look, here's your money donation ?

Is it harder to reject in the latter case? And how so ?

To me, logic dictates that the cases are identical, but perhaps when people see the bill in front of them on the table, it's different than you asking them to have it while it's still in your pocket ?

The psychology of people never stops to amaze me.

Of course it's different. Right now all the emails they're getting they could very well think that only a low percentage of these would actually turn into donations if they accepted bitcoins and that the onslaught of emails they're getting is just a grassroots PR campaign. But when they get the actual payment there's no doubt someone wants to send them money and it becomes a completely different matter when rejecting it.

I sent them 0.2 BTC using www.coinapult.com with this message:

I saw your message that you would be happy if every Wikipedia user would donate $5 to you.

Here is  0.2 bitcoins that as of date is a little more than $5. If you don't claim them in the next 30 days, I will be able to retrieve them. I also sent you bitcoins using BitPay here:
http://blog.bitpay.com/2012/11/donate-to-wikipedia-with-bitcoin.html

Bitcoin is a fixed supply, a first-of-its-kind, global-in-scale, decentralized digital currency and payment network that enables direct, peer-to-peer, borderless, pseudo-anonymous, nearly-instantaneous, nearly-free and irreversible cash-like transfers of value.  The first currency and money system in the world which has no counter-party risk to hold and to transfer. It has many things in common with Wikipedia, let's be friends!


I will check my email in 30 days to see if they really need my $5.

The BitPay wikipedia topic is here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128382 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128382)

This is silly.  Stop harassing them guys.  I'm pretty sure it's counter-productive.

I don't understand that. 

Prompting Wikipedia to take bitcoin helps them as well as the btc community.
Many people do not donate to WP because of the hassles of converting to USD. That is why US citizens make the majority of donations to WP even though they are a minority of its user-base.

It's harassment to send them money after they asked for it?

Yes, I did hold out my hand, saying, look here's my money, do you want it ? And the reason I did it was because they asked for it. Then they reject it, to me that's a personal offence, and I find it severely arrogant. I hope that one day I will be able to stare Josh VanDavier directly in his eyes and tell him exactly what I think of this behaviour.

Also it's not harassment, it's showing interest. Every company should be happy that users show interest.

There's no reason whatsoever that wikimedia should not accept bitcoins at this point. These projects have so much in common.

They certainly won't ever accept it if their users never request it.

It seems like a lot of smart people are involved with bitcoins. People that would also be likely to contribute to wikimedia, so these two projects would go nicely hand in hand. It's not so much that bitcoin have more to gain at this point than there is to gain from wikipedia. All it would take for wikipedia would be to ask bitpay to set up a payment solution for them, or some other payment provider, so they didn't even need to touch btc if they didn't want to.

The effort involved with accepting bitcoin is about as difficult as setting up a jar in a bar.

Let them play their game. In the future, when they find it safer to immediately convert their fiat donations to bitcoin, they will also accept bitcoin.

Offering a donation is harrassment?   ???

I mean, if a guy showed up at my store and asked if I accept Pesos or Rubles and then pulled them out and set them on the counter, can I call the cops because I'm being harrassed?

Come on guys.  It's not so hard to understand.

If you propose to donate money but only in a currency they feel skeptical about (for whatever reason), it's easy for them to think it looks like a nigerian scam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam) or a foot-in-the-door technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_in_the_door).

They've known about bitcoin for quite some time now.  We've tried many times to convince them.  So unless you have new arguments, let it go.

Were they inclined to accept bitcoin, they would have done so long ago.

Wikipedia asking for donations with only Paypal/Visa/MC donation options is lame.  (Some hate using their MC/Visa online or don't have one... with Paypal people have been screwed around - via payment or reception of payment... Nevermind asking anyone that works at a bank what they think of Paypal and the transactions. They'd give you an earful.)

I had wrote an email a to Wikipedia saying I would donate 10BTC as I use their service a ton.  If they can't employ a trader to do their transactions from Mt.Gox or whichever to their fiat currency of choice and then to deposit the money into their bank... then they are missing out on one of the easiest anonymous payment services available.

For a progressive information service they sure are operating financially in the dark ages.  Maybe they should do a bottle drive? lol.

Or, they really don't need the money that bad after all...

TC.

...I know, I know... this is like beating the issue senseless.  But it really gets my goat when I see the Wikipedia banner begging for money.

If someone is in touch with them perhaps they can point out that one of the first Bitcoin transactions was 10,000 BTC to buy a pizza.
Four years later and the same amount would buy the average US house!

Perhaps they can also point out that in 1996 few people had a cell-phone. Four years later every man and his dog had one.

Also that in 2001 Wikipedia was just starting. After four years it was rivaling the 200 year old Britannia, and has now long surpassed it.

This is what happens when disruptive technology hits the road. They need to reconsider their view about Bitcoin and get ahead of the curve.

If several people joined to make a sizable donation, it would certainly be more difficult for them to reject it :). I wonder how much money we've already donated through Bitpay…

Doesn't Bitpay make this information public?

what is evil about wikipedia ? you're better and smarter than everyone else ?

Wikipedia evil?

Just makes the devil look that much smarter, I guess :P

After the first day, BitPay paid to Wikipedia  $790.36 :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128382.msg1368966#msg1368966

Wikipedia will accept Amazon Coin before it accepts bitcoin.

Perhaps I should ask for their address so I could send them a pack of toilet papers. Anyone know if there's any manufacturer making toiletpapers with the Bitcoin-symbol on it ?

It might get further to donate to a non USA branch of wiki via bitcoin.   I guess they are hoping to garner favour with Washington politics and at some point derive funding from that QE deficit system

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Tax_Deductibility/en


I dont think they are especially guilty, alot of education is biased to government policy such as economic doctrine

STT  posted:
Yes, I wondered about Wikimedia Deutschland's view on accepting bitcoin, given Germany's more tolerant views, but all their donation
choices showed were (https://spenden.wikimedia.de/spenden/?piwik_campaign=wikimedia_de_hauptseite&piwik_kwd=Icon-mit-Schrift-Spenden.png (https://spenden.wikimedia.de/spenden/?piwik_campaign=wikimedia_de_hauptseite&piwik_kwd=Icon-mit-Schrift-Spenden.png)):

• Lastschrift (direct debit)
• Überweisung (bank transfer)
• Paypal
• Kreditkarte (credit card)

Also, wikimedia USA may not be touching bitcoins because of the hostile reaction by US banks. Look at yesterday's Forbe's article
at http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/15/bitcoin-companies-and-entrepreneurs-cant-get-bank-accounts/

which has:

"almost every U.S.-based startup who previously had banking was cut off if the word ‘bitcoin’ was mentioned"

If I was responsible for a large educational foundation, I too would be scared of doing anything that would basically kill the operation.

If Wikipedia had a facility to donate with Bitcoins, I'd definitely donate. I use Wikipedia for school research way more than I should