Adam Hunt wrote on Wikitech-l:
I don't suppose that there is a history graph of the donations to Wikimedia.
I was thinking about creating something like that with Gnumeric (maybe I'll try OpenOffice Calc...). The trouble is with finding tabular data that do not have personal information in them (such as names).
But I'll explore around PayPal to see what options they have. Ah, I just figured it out; there is a 'Download account history to comma-delimited text' function. That makes it very easy to delete unpublishable columns. But that leaves the issue of different currencies which makes graphing grand totals a bit more complicated... Argh! :)
I was currious how much of the US$31k was raised as a result of Jimmy Wales' December 28 letter and the associated Slashdot coverage.
Well when he wrote the letter we had US$4,200 total (bank account + PayPal; not sure if the petty cash was included in that figure). You do the math. :) Oh and from the 28th to the 31st there were 1483 PayPal donations. Most of which were less that US$20 or the equivalent but there were a few large donations. There were only 3 donations between the 24th and the 27th. But our servers were having a great deal of trouble at that point and I'm not sure if Jimbo transferred any money to the foundation's bank account during that time (I don't think he did).
I was also wondering if Wikimedia's accounting ledegers are open to the public.
Not really right now. We still have to figure out what is legal to show given our set-up. But account totals should be fine (charities very often publicize totals during donation drives). And of course any expenditures need to be logged and deducted from the totals (as well as transfers - I plan to track all of that and make it public on the foundation's website). All that requires time to set-up though. Hopefully I'll have something substantial to show in late January.
BTW, I've been updating the totals at http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
If not, why (this isn't a flame, I'm sure that there is a good enough reason)?
I just got access to the foundation's PayPal account on New Year's Eve and don't yet have a way to view the bank account statements. And Jimbo simply isn't superman. :) That's why I volunteered to help with this type of stuff.
Thanks for the great site. In my opinion Wikimedia deserves at least another US$30k in 2004.
I'm sure that the foundation will receive much more than that. I plan to start figuring out the dos and don't of grant writing later in January. This may be an area where it would make sense to hire a professional grant writer but I still want to do some research on the subject anyway. At the very least it will inform us better about what we should tell the grant writer.
However I am confident that a majority of the money we get through donations will be from individual donors, not charitable foundations. All the better as far as I am concerned (foundation money often comes with at least implied strings attached to do certain things).
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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