Most of us will agree that having the Wikimedia foundation (known for operating Wikipedia) accept Bitcoin donations could be a very important milestone in Bitcoin's adoption. They are famous for having refused for a long time with obscure reasons, but I believe they are warming up to the idea, and that it's high time we take concrete action about it.
Why is Wikipedia accepting bitcoin so important? This detail needs to be quantified and qualified. Is there not any other lower hanging fruit than Wikipedia?
To me it just seems right that Wikipedia should accept Bitcoin. We love Wikipedia and we love Bitcoin and they will work well together. "I'm tired of wanting Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin, I want Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin."
Everyone knows Wikipedia and new people hearing about Bitcoin will have a much more accurate perception about it if they know that it accepts Bitcoin donations.
It's a high-hanging fruit, sure, but it's well worth the effort.
I don't know how to quantify any of this, though.
In a recent discussion on Quora, Jimmy Wales has stated a few reasons to reject Bitcoin donations, and surprisingly they were all quite tangible. By this point it is already assumed that the donations will be immediately converted to USD via a provider such as BitPay, to help with accounting and make it easier to use the funds. The main objections were:
1. The amount that would be donated via Bitcoin is too small to be worth the trouble.
This objection is the easiest to refute; all we need is to demonstrate the quantitative aspects of our willingness to donate, and this is what this post is mostly about.
2. Adding more donation options is known to create "choice paralysis" and decrease the total amount donated. They have a process of A/B testing for measuring the effect of adding new options; this testing will increase the cost of even considering to add this option.
To this Jimmy suggested that they could add information about Bitcoin donations in a separate page not linked to from the main donations page. I find this to be a very acceptable compromise; we'll be able to donate, and we'll be able to tell people Wikipedia accepts Bitcoin donations.
3. Accepting bitcoins can be perceived as making a value judgement about Bitcoin, which they are hesitant to do.
I believe this can be alleviated with proper framing, and that making this available only from an orphan page will further reduce the perceived impact.
It seems out of your list that item 3 is the real reason for their concern: "Accepting bitcoins can be perceived as making a value judgement about Bitcoin, which they are hesitant to do."
Item 1: Apparently, we need to quantify how much "trouble" it is to accept money. I am serious. This not just an issue at Wikipedia but will be an issue for any charity/organization. Quantifying the "worth", well, what is the worth of Wikipedia? That is a "value judgement" about Wikipedia and is best left to each individual, but I can say, Wikipedia's worth is probably much greater than the amount of donations they receive. Don't get me wrong, I think a community pledge has its merits.
The trouble is very organization-dependent. Sending an email to Bitpay asking to be hooked up with a direct deposit donation address is easy. But the various legal, accounting and ethical qualms depend very much on the scale and structure of the organization.
We can use the number of people familiar with an organization as a metric for judging the worth of getting it on board; I think the worth will be superlinear in that metric.
Item 2: "Choice paralysis"... a study should be conducted to quantify this claim; possibly a similar study has already been conducted and has been published somewhere. But on the surface, it seems that Wikipedia does not worry too much about this as they already except payments through moneybookers.com (Skrill). In other words, this argument is a smoke screen. As a community, we should incur the cost of this study (i.e., testing), not Wikipedia. And this study should be unbiased and published appropriately.
By Jimmy's word, which I believe, they have made such studies, and they do A/B testing for each new method they add. I don't know if they're willing to share the results of these studies. I agree this seems odd given that they accept some esoteric donation methods, but they say these has been tested to increase total proceeds.
I agree completely that we should offer to sponsor research on including Bitcoin donations, but the current pledged amount isn't sufficient for that.
Importantly, having a separate, orphan Bitcoin donation page will cause them less trouble in this aspect, and is satisfactory.
Item 3: Being
switzerland is just good policy... You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink it. And you may never really know the real reason why. It may be that buying Linden dollars on Second Life with real money makes some people's stomachs churn.
An ambitious goal will be to explain Bitcoin to them to the point that they're willing to make such a value judgement. A more conservative goal is to convince them that accepting Bitcoin donations would not be such a statement.
It may be more valuable to target lower hanging fruit and use the resources on conducting studies to prove our point.
For reasons stated above I believe Wikipedia is a good target. Other goals can also be pursued of course, but I don't think the lessons learned from this are very transferable.
As for Wikipedia, I proposed a different approach
here... which is basically to use the fundamentals of Wikipedia (i.e., to document history) against itself approach. We can not put Wikipedia in the history of bitcoin right now, but we can put them in as the quintessential charity that does not accept bitcoin.
I don't see how going meta can help, and it can also be perceived as WP:POINT. Our method should not be to antagonize the decision makers at Wikimedia.
