[WikiEN-l] The end of donations

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Jay
Litwyn<brewhaha at freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> wrote:
> "stevertigo" <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote in message
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 3:14 PM, stevertigo<stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It occurs to me that when people donate money to something, it is to
>>> some degree with an expectation that the recipient entity grows to
>>> eventually gain a certain kind of financial self-sufficiency. Is this
>>> not also the case with Wikimedia and many charitable donations to it?

I normally expect this.

> Carcharoth answered that question in October or November: can't do it for
> reasons in 501(c) that give us tax advantages. For those tax advantages, we
> forfeit our ability to acquire self-sustaining amounts of investment wealth;

This is untrue.  You can qualify as a publicly supported charity as
long as 10% of total support/revenue comes from government funds and
from public donations.  (If over a third comes from government and
public contributions, you're golden; but if you are clearly a publicly
supported entity such as a library or educational institution,
organized to 'attract new [government and public] support' you can get
by with just 10%)

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p557.pdf   (see p.29)


We simply need to define a basic set of features and services that
will be covered entirely by a self-sustaining foundation; and can
raise further government and public funds to support new projects,
R&D, creative PR or outreach schemes, or a print Wikipedia 1.0 in
1,296 volumes...

SJ