That's an interesting question, Rupert. I've thought a bit about it and it's
related to Chris Keating's thread at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_happens_when_the_money_tree_stops_growi….
To do this analysis and draw meaningful conclusions, there are so many variables you would
need to control, including:
- population of internet users (not a lot of good data available though ITU's are ok)
- overlap of a internet user language skills with a high quality language-version of
Wikipedia (maybe less important)
- cultural predisposition toward charitable giving (very difficult to quantify)
- penetration of payment systems that might work online (e.g. credit cards, paypal, direct
transfer; anything but cash)
If you could control for all of those, maybe it's possible to the relationship between
Wikimedia donations and GDP/capita to compare the effectiveness of messaging / fundraising
in different countries.
A better way to do the broader analysis might be to use comScore data on Unique Visitors
to projects in different countries (they make estimates for about 40 countries IIRC) to
look at fundraising per visitor to the projects. Of course you'd still need to
control for the above factors, and it doesn't address the broader question of how well
we are all reaching the broader population of internet users in each country. You could
do this analysis more broadly looking at Erik Zachte's page view data by country (e.g.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryO…)
but it's a bit tougher to explain when you use a Page View concept rather than a
visitor.
A smaller more doable analysis might be to compare year over year performance for a single
country. So if you could get good data on internet users (or in countries where it's
relatively stable now), it might be a useful way to track performance of fundraising from
one year to the next.
As much as I would love to, i don't have time to play with this data now. If anyone
wants to, I did a quick data dump from comScore for January with their key data points for
all the projects across the countries and regions they report. See attached.
-s
On Feb 26, 2012, at 5:07 AM, rupert THURNER wrote:
hi,
how much sense does it make to compare donations and spending against the population and
the economic power of a country? we already have such numbers? i tried to put some
together exemplary for 2011 fundraiser, with 2012 budgets, comparing germany, india,
united states. but i am quite unsure if such a table makes sense ...
for the spending, it seems that twice as much money is spent in the united states, than
in germany. india is far, far, away. but, i _think_ this might be true for most of the
countries. just to make it clear, if somebody living in the u.s. travels to india, it
would be counted as an expense in the united states, not india.
for fundraising, in countries like germany and switzerland 50% - 100% more is donated
than in the united states, depending if one counts GDP or population. people in india,
despite having a much bigger GDP than germany, do not donate a lot of money to the
movement.
de
in
us
80
1210
310
population, mio
5400
190
14400
donations, thousand
3089
4469
15065
gdp, billion
3640
50
28000
spending, thousand (local people, living in the country)
38
4
48
gdp/capita, thousand
68
0.16
46
donation/capita
1.75
0.04
0.96
donation/gdp
45
0.04
90
spending/capita
1.18
0.01
1.86
spending/gdp
references:
* 2011 donations:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah1QkDyemcHbdHNFZEs0ZEgxWHF2cV…
* budget wmde 2012:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Wirtschaftsplan_2012_WMD…
* the above table in google docs:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Amy296SGLxdvdHVSNkZoSGFFV2dmOX…
rupert.
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