Moreover, because fundraising reports are now so stingy, we can't even
know the (per-country) effects of such decisions (cc fundraiser@), hence
public accountability is impossible.
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fundraising/2013-14_Repor…
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2012/Report#Totals_by_coun…
Nemo
Lodewijk, 17/11/2014 20:28:
> A while back now, the chapters were no longer allowed to fundraise, because
> the Wikimedia Foundation argued they would be better able to do this. At
> the time, this sounded somewhat reasonable. However, since then, there have
> been some disturbing developments - at least for Dutch donors.
>
> No longer it is possible to pay electronically (iDEAL, one of the most
> common methods is no longer supported - 'electronic banking' simply refers
> you back to the credit card page) or even via regular bank transfer (using
> an IBAN) in the Netherlands. The donation page
> <https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPag…>
> only
> allows credit card and paypal, and the 'other ways to give' simply sends
> you to the helpdesk if you want to make a bank transfer payment.
>
> What is the reasoning behind this? Have bank transfers become a legal
> swamp? Are there statistics suggesting that this method was no longer
> required by donors? Did the European bank account somehow get temporarily
> suspended?
>
> If it has become so hard to donate, maybe it makes more sense to send the
> donors to the local chapter pages where they can actually donate in the
> local suitable methods (in this case, Wikimedia Netherlands offers both
> iDEAL and IBAN
> <http://www.wikimedia.nl/pagina/doneren-aan-wikimedia-nederland>).
>
> One of the Dutch OTRS team members asked for elaboration, but didn't quite
> get a satisfying answer. I hope this is a temporary situation, and that
> this threshold will be removed again. It would be sad if we go through all
> kind of trouble to enable long tail methods like bitcoin, but skip bank
> transfer...
>
> Best,
Hello, guys!
We received some alerts from our users that donations are now blocked when
user is from Russia:
http://habrastorage.org/files/31b/b1f/ec9/31bb1fec9b9e45abb6ac4babcc237184.…
The only WMF comment I received in #wikimedia-fundraising was that "we
don't run fundraising in Russia at the moment". Russia is now blacklisted
like Libya, like Congo, like Iraq.
I always though that WMF is free from politics and tends to be transparent,
but why such a decision was made? And why nobody informed us (at least,
Wikimedia RU) about it?
Now we are starting to receive negative feedbacks from users and readers
who treat WMF as a politically motivated organization, not a non-profit
organization promoting free knowledge.
And as we got no comments from Fundraising team and have no idea what
happened, we at Wikimedia RU are not able to cope with such negative
publicity.
It's now late evening in Russia, but the messages were already posted to
some top websites of Russia, and this will be promoted quickly via social
networks: so, tomorrow will be a bad day for wiki-movement in our country.
WMF, I want to thank you a lot for your transparency.
rubin16
