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_Report... * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2012/Report#Totals_by_count...

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:FundraiserLandingPage&country=NL&uselang=en&utm_medium=spontaneous&utm_source=fr-redir&utm_campaign=spontaneous 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,