Till Westermayer wrote:
-- Paypal does not require a credit card. You can make direct bank transfers as well.
Without creating a PayPal account (which I didn't want at the moment) I wasn't able to make sure if this applies to free PayPal accounts and to bank accounts outside the US. Could you please give some more information on this?
I was unable to find any more information by logging in either. The "add a checking account" section doesn't specifically say anything about it being a US checking account, but since it knows I'm from the US it may be displaying the "US version" of the page to me. Perhaps a euro-zone Wikipedian with a paypal account could investigate?
But credit cards just are not that common in the Euro zone -- I guess you're not familiar with money transfer systems here. E.g., a lot of operations in Germany is made via Online Banking systems at the moment, and there is also the Maestro EC debit card system used in many countries of the eurozone.
Yeah, I'm not too familiar with them. I do recall that many places in Belgium did accept credit cards last time I visited, particularly restaurants (Diner's Club seems particularly popular there, while it's rather unpopular in the US, but I saw plenty of MasterCard, Visa, and American Express signs in restaurant and shop windows as well). Oddly it was my *debit* card that wouldn't work (the US and European debit card networks must not be interconnected).
What is the usual procedure in the Euro-zone for ordering stuff online, e.g. from amazon.de? Do you enter a debit number with PIN, or do a bank transfer?
On the other hand, the expenses are all currently in the US, so the currency will have to be converted at some point to US$. This would also require a resident of Europe to handle the bank account and to periodically mail checks to Jimbo (or bank transfer the funds to a US account, which probably isn't free).
It depends on the number of euro zone Wikipedians and the amount of money that'll be founded by them, if this is a good idea or not.
Yeah, if there's a lot of donations from euro-zone Wikipedians, a bulk currency conversion may get us a better rate than converting each transaction to US$, so this might be something to consider. It may complicate the legal situation though -- is Wikipedia, as a US soon-to-be-501(c)(3) corporation, allowed to have euro-zone bank accounts? If not, we could have a euro-zone individual create a bank account to collect money in the name of Wikipedia, and then transfer it to the US foundation, but that may (or may not) be complicated legally (on that matter I have no knowledge).
-Mark