fundraising blocked in Russia - Fundraiser

12 Nov 2014


      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.p...
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