Minor correction: this system in the Netherlands works the other way
around: donors can get back a part of their donation through their tax
reduction - it is not that the charity gets a bonus.
Interestingly, the Wikimedia Foundation has obtained this status (ANBI) in
the Netherlands at the urging of the chapter several years ago (2010/2011).
However, for some reason the WMF chooses not to advertize this (not so
obvious) fact on the donation home page; which means that the donors are
unaware that they can donate and get this reduction of their taxes (indeed
up to 50% of the donation amount!). This is mindboggling to me - it should
be an easy fix.
Lodewijk
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hoi,
> A similar possibility is in existence in the Netherlands... National
> charities can easily get such a status. It is possible for international
> organisations but it is more difficult..
>
> In order to optimise fundraisers it is extremely relevant that we optimise
> it for our donors. That makes it very much in need of local efforts.
>
> As it is we lose 50% of the giftst of our donors in the Netherlands to the
> taxman.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On 4 December 2014 at 22:10, Andy Mabbett <andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk>
> wrote:
>
> > I've split this from a more general thread, for convenience...
> >
> >
> > On 3 December 2014 at 01:16, Megan Hernandez <mhernandez(a)wikimedia.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Starting today, banners are being shown to 100% of anonymous readers on
> > > English Wikipedia in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
> >
> > How much money do we expect to raise (or did we last year), from the
> > UK? How much of the money raised from the UK will attract "Gift
> > Aid"[*] tax releif?
> >
> >
> > [* Gift AId is a UK scheme where the government gives, to a charity,
> > tax paid by a donor. For every £80 such a donor gives, the charty
> > would receive £100]
> >
> > --
> > Andy Mabbett
> > @pigsonthewing
> > http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>
Hi all,
If you do a Google search and look at the Wikipedia results, e.g.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Malvinas+Argentinas+International+Airpor…
you will see that the results state:
"DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: You're probably busy, so we'll get right to it.
This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence from
corporate"
Instead of the article information.
It doesn't sit right with me that fundraising is interfering with Google
results, and even moreso due to it stating "to protect our independence
from corporate...."
Is there some way that this can be prevented, short of not using Google?
Russavia
Why would you need an "IT team" to track the A/B testing? 100% of the code
for the banners and banner delivery is publicly accessible and there is a
detailed automatically-generated log of all changes to fundraising banners
and campaigns (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralNoticeLogs).
If you want anybody to believe your asinine conspiracy theories, you're
going to need to point to some code to prove it.
Kaldari
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Site Admin <1924.hra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear David
>
> This is yet another example of how Wikipedia is seriously broken
>
> Here is a screenshot of a deliberate full screen advt being thrust on
> the global south.
> http://i.imgur.com/2J0FgAP.jpg
>
> Our IT team has extensively engaged in tracking the A-B testing WMF is
> doing.
> Here are some raw findings
>
> 1. WMF seems able to access Google's data base API to target logged-in
> Google
> users for their ads text content and initial banner size.
>
> 2. Males get larger banners then females.
>
> 3. Persons in UK and India get a large percentage of full screen ads.
> Something to do with
>
> 4. Multiple viewed pages get these advts. In other words they don't
> stop / give up after you've clicked the "X" and said "no".
>
> 5. Logged in Wikipedian declared females {we had a tiny sample
> size on this} got advts no larger than 25% screen size.
>
> 6. The more "males" refuse these advts by clicking the "X",
> the larger the advt size on your next visit. In one case, an
> especially persistent "no" sayer, the banner width was 8x his
> actual screen width.
>
> HRA1924
>
> On 12/5/14, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just used a not-logged-in browser for once. Literally the whole page
> > was the ad. It was startlingly obnoxious. I'm sure you can get
> > startling click-through rates with an ad that appears to completely
> > replace the thing you actually went to the page for.
> >
> > - d
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Gender Gap" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to gender-gap+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>
I found on Facebook feed the next article [1]. The article title was
so amusing that I had to read the article: Stop giving Wikimedia
money.
Although I thought I'll find something totally irrelevant, the article
actually reveals that the author is pretty well introduced into
internal Wikimedia issues. Which is, in turn, insufficient for article
to be a good one, but this one has some good points.
Big banner. I admit, there are some benefits of living in the second
class country by the Western financial norms. I saw that banner just
on Commons. But that's the known issue. My question here is: Is there
a way to get similar amount of money from the public in some other
way? For example, I am sure that there are many people outside who
would be willing to donate ~$10/month if they don't have to think
about that (i.e., opt-in for monthly charge).
"We're a small non-profit...". Huh. I am working for one American
non-profit with few times bigger budget than WMF, which management
treat themselves as "a small non-profit". I mean, I fully understand
that kind of reasoning. There are much bigger non-profits in the wild.
BUT, keep in mind that, not counting bigger retailers, I'd have to
walk 15-20 minutes from my home to find a visible business which has
comparable revenue. And I am living in not that poor city in the
richest municipality of my country. Please, just remove that "small"
in the future.
There are some points in relation to the programming failures. They
are now funny to me because I know that things are moving, as well as
we have now engineering-focused ED. Just one year ago that wouldn't be
that funny because it would hurt.
$684.000 gross or $3200 per capita for furniture sounds, hm,
interesting. May somebody explain that? I am not saying that employees
should live nomadic lives inside of the office; not even that it's
about outrageously decadent spending, but the amount doesn't sound too
rational, as well as it's partially in collision with Sue's quote
inside of the article.
Now, the crucial point from the article "[Money] doesn’t go to content
creation at all.".
It's heresy to us, but the fact that it's heresy to us gives open
field to that kind of very valid criticism: WMF is spending few
percents of the budget on the content and people are using its
projects because of the content (yes, few percents include projects
where we are not paying people to actually write the content, but for
the projects which lead to the content creation).
I didn't think about possible answers. The argument just strikes me on
the line that Wikimedia is basically exploitative toward her editors
comparably to Uber toward their drivers.
What differs us from Uber and makes our position better is the fact
that we are community-driven movement (as well as encyclopedia
publishers are on average much more predatory organizations than
various organizations of taxi drivers).
However, there are some issues which should be addressed, definitely. Ideas?
[1] http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/
Hi all,
In the latest round of Individual Engagement Grants
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG>, 26 eligible proposals were
submitted for review. The committee recommended 7 projects be funded in
total, with 13 grantees selected to receive $98,271 overall, and WMF has
now approved all 7 grants. Here’s what we’re funding.[1]
1. *Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Art%2BFeminism_Editathon_trainin…>:
This project will build on a series of successful 2014 edit-a-thons to
develop scalable online infrastructure, including training materials and a
network of facilitators, to support the expansion and sustainability of
the Art+Feminism movement, aimed at improving Wikipedia’s coverage of
notable women in history, art, and beyond.
2. *Automated Notability Detection*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection>:
This project aims to develop a classification algorithm that can assess
likeliness of notability (initially within English Wikipedia) and can be
used to support editors’ review of newly created articles.
3. *Digitization of Important Libraries Book Catalog in Andhra Pradesh
and Telangana*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Digitization_of_Important_Librar…>:
Through a partnership between the Telugu Wikipedia community and
brick-and-mortar libraries in India, this project will endeavour to
digitize five library catalogues of Telugu books in order to support Telugu
Wikipedians searching for verifiable sources for new article content.
4. *Fundación Joaquín Díaz*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Fundaci%C3%B3n_Joaqu%C3%ADn_D%C3…>:
This project will see 23,000 sound recordings from the ethnographic archive
of the Joaquín Díaz
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Fundaci%C3%B3n_Joaqu%C3%ADn_D%C3…>
Foundation in Urueña, Spain uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free
license, and could serve as a potential model for other institutional
collaborations.
5. *Revision scoring as a service*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service>:
The grantees of this project will develop machine classification for
assessing quality of contributions on multiple language Wikipedias
as a publicly
queryable API. This service will in turn support the development of new and
powerful tools to support editors beyond the English language Wikipedia
environment.
6. *WikiBrainTools*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiBrainTools>: This
project seeks to democratize access to Wikipedia-based algorithms across
all Wikipedias, and allow Wikimedians to leverage the work of natural
language processing researchers to build smarter tools for Wikipedia. In
particular, WikiBrainTools will attempt to close the loop between
algorithmic researchers who mine Wikipedia to improve computer-derived
insight, Wikipedia developers who could be integrating algorithms into
their bots and tools, and Wikipedia researchers who could stand to benefit
from tools that improve pattern recognition.
7. *WikiProject X*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiProject_X>: This project
will explore and test design solutions for encouraging optimal
effectiveness and supporting sustainability and collaboration between
groups of contributors within a WikiProject on English Wikipedia.
Additionally, one project funded in the last IEG round, Women Scientists
Workshop Development
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Women_Scientists_Workshop_Develo…>,
was also approved by WMF for another 6 months of renewed funding, to
experiment with scaling the model.
Congratulations to the successful grantees! We encourage you to participate
and follow their progress
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-engaging> as they begin
work in the coming weeks.
You can also read more about this round in the IEG committee’s post on the
Wikimedia Foundation blog
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/05/ieg-selects-exciting-new-batch-of-exp…>
.
To everyone who contributed to this round of grants with proposals, ideas,
feedback and suggestions: thank you! The next call for proposals opens on
March 2015 – we look forward to seeing more of your ideas and engagement
again soon.
Sincerely,
Harold Hidalgo
Individual Engagement Grants Committee
--
*Harold A. Hidalgo*
Novo Adagio Magazine
Hi all
Below is an email I've just received inviting me to join the Gender Gap
mailing list. It's sent from russiaviation(a)gmail.com and has been passing
off as me.
I mentioned on the Gender Gap mailing list the other day that this was not
me, but now it would appear that email addresses on this mailing list are
being scraped.
If you receive an email purporting to be from myself and it's not from this
email addy (and with an IINET IP), you can be assured it is not myself. If
I wanted to troll you all, you all know that I have more elaborate ways of
doing this if I really wanted to do that. :)
It could appear from the message they sent it is our Indian friend who is
doing this; but of course it could be someone joe jobbing them too. Who
knows, who cares, it's not me all the same.
Cheers
Russavia
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Russavia (Google Groups) <gender-gap+noreply(a)googlegroups.com>
Date: Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 1:08 AM
Subject: Google Groups: You've been added to Gender Gap
To: russavia.wikipedia(a)gmail.com
"Gender-Gap International" spreading Transparency and WikiLove
--------------------------------------------------------------
I regret that XYZ has thought it necessary to bring his/her personal
grievance to the Wikimedia-l mailing list now that s/he is unable to make
such comments on the Wikimedia-XYZ list or the WM-XYZ website. I would hope
that the moderators will consider whether providing a platform for this
type of attack is conducive to the health of the Wikimedia movement.
___________
Michael Maggs
Chair, Wikimedia UK
About this group:
Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participation
of women within Wikimedia projects. We want to encourage you to engage with
others in this effort.
The owner of the group has set your subscription type as "Email",
meaning that you'll receive a copy of every message posted to the group as
they are posted. Visit This Group
<http://groups.google.com/d/forum/gender-gap?hl=en>
[image: Visit Google Groups] <https://groups.google.com/?hl=en>
Start your own group <http://groups.google.com/d/creategroup?hl=en>,
unsubscribe
from this group
<http://groups.google.com/d/forum/gender-gap/unsubscribe/1KzA4xQAAAAp3EJgqb7…>,
or stop invitations like this
<http://groups.google.com/d/optout?hl=en>. or report
spam
<http://groups.google.com/d/abuse/YQAAAEwZXucMAAAAMHY_I2wAAADPrIBRAUs70uGdiR…>.
Thanks, Asaf and the others, for the talk about the global south
in deeper terms. That's both an important and interesting perspective.
I've tried to get a grip on the issue of the two major languages
in Ukraine, and how they affect the use and development of
Wikipedia. But I haven't yet read any detailed info of those
device defaults. Do you know more about what kinds of devices,
what kinds of applications, the reasoning involved and any talk
of trends? I'd be very happy to know more on the subject. :-)
Best of wishes,
/Per A.J. Andersson, Göteborg, Sweden
(Wikipedia user: Paracel63)
>Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2014 16:18:47 -0800
>From: Asaf Bartov <abartov(a)wikimedia.org>
>To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Invitation to WMF November 2014 Metrics &
>Activities Meeting: Thursday, December 4, 19:00 UTC
>Message-ID:
><CAAmrcwccDtUg7_dWa90k+NFN-s2sghhXUWpAKpO7Kh0qfGGVDQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
/snippet/
>In Anglophone Africa, for example, most people are used to looking for
>information online in English and not in indigenous languages. But in
>Brazil, people consume information in Portuguese, but many (16%) also refer
>to the English Wikipedia (and intriguingly, 1 in 3 *edits* from Brazil is
>to ENWP!), presumably for its broader coverage or higher average quality.
>In Ukraine, 70% read the Russian Wikipedia and only 17% read the Ukrainian
>Wikipedia; interviews tell me this is largely due to device defaults,
>beyond the obvious different in size and average quality.
>
>This page reveals some of those breakdowns:
>http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/
>SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryBreakdown.htm
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 2:05 PM, Site Admin <1924.hra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear David
>
> This is yet another example of how Wikipedia is seriously broken
>
> Here is a screenshot of a deliberate full screen advt being thrust on
> the global south.
> http://i.imgur.com/2J0FgAP.jpg
>
> Our IT team has extensively engaged in tracking the A-B testing WMF is
> doing.
> Here are some raw findings
>
> 1. WMF seems able to access Google's data base API to target logged-in
> Google
> users for their ads text content and initial banner size.
>
> 2. Males get larger banners then females.
>
> 3. Persons in UK and India get a large percentage of full screen ads.
> Something to do with
>
> 4. Multiple viewed pages get these advts. In other words they don't
> stop / give up after you've clicked the "X" and said "no".
>
> 5. Logged in Wikipedian declared females {we had a tiny sample
> size on this} got advts no larger than 25% screen size.
>
> 6. The more "males" refuse these advts by clicking the "X",
> the larger the advt size on your next visit. In one case, an
> especially persistent "no" sayer, the banner width was 8x his
> actual screen width.
>
> HRA1924
>
>
Did you also notice that suspected members of the Illuminati received no
banners, only discrete little counters measuring how much money had been
pocketed by the Bilderberg Group?
