Numbers have been updated and corrected.

On Day 4 (Monday 21 February eastern US timezone since PayPal data are not available in UTC) we made $6,586.15 (USD equivalent) through PayPal (no updates available for other sources at this time). This is a decrease of 16.44% from Day 3 but still does represent 18.85% of total funds collected so far ($34,946.69 ; only counting full days) and 8.78% of our goal ($75,000).

Remarkably, the rate of donations were not too adversely affected by the downtime today. Since the donation forms were not available during a large part of the downtime, I can only guess that people remembered our PayPal account name.

Donations did significantly increase soon after a Slashdot story about the downtime was released (9:28PM, EST), forcing us to move the backup donation page once the Slashdot Effect brought down the website hosting it (http://wikisearch.org ; Sorry about that Angela).

NOTE: Pending transactions are also included in the below numbers (some of them will likely turn out to be canceled)

Day 4 Day 3 comparison Breakdown: PayPal USD equiv USD equiv %change AUD 32 $25.30 $330.90 -92.36% CAD 785 $636.09 $238.93 166.23% EUR 1489.63 $1,947.24 $2,755.66 -29.34% GBP 332.06 $630.18 $696.89 -9.57% JPY 8501 $80.58 $198.96 -59.50% USD 3266.76 $3,266.76 $3,596.33 -9.16% PayPal total: $6,586.15 $7,817.66 -15.75% MoneyBookers no data $64.00 -100.00% TOTAL $6,586.15 $7,881.66 -16.44%

Grand totals so far (only counting complete days) PayPal USD equiv %GrandTotal AUD 1157.1 $914.69 2.62% CAD 1719.92 $1,393.65 3.99% EUR 9469.28 $12,378.24 35.42% GBP 1654.34 $3,139.61 8.98% JPY 90723 $859.96 2.46% USD 15833.85 $15,833.85 45.31% PayPal total: $34,520.00 Moneybookers: $426.69 1.22% GRAND TOTAL $34,946.69 100.00% % toward goal 46.60%

For the most recent grand total and other details visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1 (once everything is back up)

Some selected comments from Day 4: See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1/Day_4 in about a day (hopefully I'll be able to post by then)

"I love this site. Keep up the awesome work!" by Anonymous

"I use Wiki - I have to pay for it !" by Immo Wetzel

"You have aided me countless times in my academic pursuits in math, science, and the humanities. I can't thank you guys enough." by Laura Napolitano

"Wiki is the future!" by Christoph Burschka

"Wikipedia is in my opinion one of the most noble collective human endeavours underway in the world today. Thank you so much for contributing to society with your wonderful website. I love it and abide" by Matthew Barba

"Wikimedia Rocks!" by Jasmeet Singh

"I have always had a thirst for knowledge, and this project does more than quench it. I am happy to donate." by Matthew Gluesenkamp

"Cheaper than cable" by Anonymous

Some of my favorites:

"Spread your Squids around the world. And use cached pages for logged in users as well. Fix those and I'll be happy as a [[clam]]. Good job so far!!!" by Rami Lehti

"A small price to pay for a project like this. But get a move on with all those ambitious plans for paper versions. Most of the world doesn't have computers." by Anonymous

"The Wikimedia Foundations is an acheivement of great proportions spreading the one firm truth that information is truly free. Thank you." by Siddharth Bhansali

"Help preserve the sum total of human knowledge for less than the price of two Caramel Frappuccinos. Wikipedia is not only fat-free and carbohydrate-free, it will never go straight to your hips!" by Jonet Greene

"Give Wiki a boost!!" by Kiminori Noma

Daniel Mayer, Wikimedia CFO

__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com

The problem is, "most of the world" - especially the most of the world without computers - doesn't speak English.

For that matter, in the computerless world, even languages such as German and French and Spanish are relatively rare. We are talking here about targeting entire continents such as Africa which are best served by native-language content which we cannot currently provide in any way shape or form. We have growing Arabic and Afrikaans Wikipedias, a minimal Swahili Wikipedia, just beginning Wolof, Bambara, Zulu, Somali, and Amharic Wikipedias, and can already obviously provide English, French, and Portuguese-language content for those Africans who can speak these languages fluently.

Most of the other places where the vast majority is computerless speak primarily languages with small or nonexistant Wikipedias. Take, for example, Bhutan. How large is the Dzongkha Wikipedia?

Or Khmer. How big is the Khmer Wikipedia?

I just hope we don't send out copies in languages people can't read or can barely read. That would be linguistic imperialism at its worst, suggesting to these people that their langauge is not good enough because we can't provide them material in it. In places like Cambodia or Bhutan this may not be too harmful because the national language is the source of a lot of national pride, but elsewhere (African nations, Native America, aboriginal Australia, autonomous Russia) it could contribute to the already worrysome trend of rapid decline of minority languages.

Until now languages of the "have nots" have been largely protected by the absence of mass media and other technology which usually serves only to hurt minority languages (although it can help in many cases), but mass distribution of for example Wikipedia in an LWC could be devastating to many languages which until now had relatively secure futures.

This is not to say we should limit access to information to save languages. However, we should think carefully before mass distribution of print editions - what language do these people speak best, and can we provide content in that language? If not, would it be possible to launch a campaign for the growth of a native-language Wikipedia?

My point is, I would be heartbroken if English copies of Wikipedia print editions are handed out in schools on Hopi, or the school in Havasupai, or schools in the Tohono O'odham Nation or the Navajo Nation or the Gaeltachta.

Mark

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:09:25 +1100, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:

[crossposted to wikipedia-l, wikien-l, wikitech-l]

Daniel Mayer (maveric149@yahoo.com) [050222 20:25]:

...

"A small price to pay for a project like this. But get a move on with all those ambitious plans for paper versions. Most of the world doesn't have computers." by Anonymous

The closest we appear to have to an active plan for this is ... mine!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/1.0

This relies on rating code (so as to let the Wiki do the work - editorial committees don't scale, editors with opinions will).

Jimbo's idea - which passes the "simple brilliant elegance" test - is to set up ratings on a large Wikipedia (e.g. en:!) and just gather data for a month or whatever. Then release the data for everyone to look at and make sense of.

This relies on someone who knows PHP writing rating code, or better yet beating Magnus Manske's existing rating code into production quality ...

I could install MediaWiki at home (it runs on FreeBSD, right?) and hack on it here. And, ahahaha, learn PHP, of which I know not a jot or tittle. And I haven't written anything longer than a quickie shell script since 1993. "Rusty" isn't in it.

So if SOMEONE ELSE who is interested and KNOWS PHP could come forward, that would be *really good*!

• d.

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

You have a very distorted view of linguistic diversity in Africa.

First of all, while there are definitely more than 500 languages in Africa, there are only 10 or 20 with over 1 million speakers.

It is very linguistically imperialistic of you to assume that the entire population of Africa is best-served by English.

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:16:12 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Mark Williamson wrote:

...

For that matter, in the computerless world, even languages such as German and French and Spanish are relatively rare. We are talking here about targeting entire continents such as Africa which are best served by native-language content which we cannot currently provide in any way shape or form. We have growing Arabic and Afrikaans Wikipedias, a minimal Swahili Wikipedia, just beginning Wolof, Bambara, Zulu, Somali, and Amharic Wikipedias, and can already obviously provide English, French, and Portuguese-language content for those Africans who can speak these languages fluently.

I'd question that: I think Africa is "best served" by whatever content the most people can read, which is likely to be English. Even expanding to say, four languages, the best choices are likely to be English, French, Arabic, and Swahili (although I can't find very good statistics on this). Unless you have a plan to simultaneously publish editions in 500 different languages, publishing in the major languages---i.e. those that the most people are able to make use of---seems like the best plan.

-Mark

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

No, you're being very unrealistic.

What percentage of the population of Africa is fluent in English?

Ge'ez.

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:42:39 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Mark Williamson wrote:

...

It is very linguistically imperialistic of you to assume that the entire population of Africa is best-served by English.

No, it is simply realistic. I'm not trying to tell people what languages they ought to know, merely observing what languages they *do* know. My goal is to get information to people in a language they can read it, not some quest to promote particular languages. If Espertanto were more successful and most of the world spoke it, I'd be happy publishing just one Wikipedia in Esperanto. As that's not the case, we have to do the next-best thing and publish in multiple languages, choosing the languages to reach as many people as possible.

See, I speak Greek fluently. Being Greek, I like the language, like speaking it, and would like it to be preserved. But it would be silly to argue that Greek ought to be one of the first languages being considered for a print version of Wikipedia. Not only are there many other languages with many more speakers, but many Greeks speak one of those other languages anyway (mostly English, with some German).

Is there any good argument for putting Greek anywhere near the top of the list of languages we ought to produce a print version of? I don't think there is---any of a number of languages (English, French, Arabic, German, Spanish, Chinese, etc.) are more useful to a much larger number of people. So why would there be a similar argument for any other language of about the same size (Greek has around ~11 million native speakers)?

The question is, basically, "what reasonable subset of the world's languages can we pick that will serve the largest number". The answer might include some languages we're not currently good at, but not that many. From what I can tell, the only languages in the top 10 whose Wikipedias are fairly inactive are Bengali and Hindi, and possibly Russian.

-Mark

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Andre Engels ha scritto:

... It will be much easier for us to create an excellent in resource in English and French than a mediocre one in 500 different African languages....

THIS is reasonable... and realistic, in my opinion.

Ciao, Nino

Gerard, I don't understand why you're answering to me!

I agree with everything you wrote.

I'm trying to help in editing the Swahili version, but only during my spare time, which is not very much!

Ciao, Nino .

Gerard Meijssen ha scritto:

pinco wrote:

...

Andre Engels ha scritto:

...

... It will be much easier for us to create an excellent in resource in English and French than a mediocre one in 500 different African languages....

THIS is reasonable... and realistic, in my opinion.

Ciao, Nino

We are creating a resource in English, French and name all the other languages. These resources are culturally biased. When people want to create their own wikipedia, a wikipedia in their own language, we should support that. If there is one thing, we have time and money to work on our projects. We can make them as NPOV as our community allows us to be.

When a new project is started, it has to get momentum but when you watch the subjects that THEY choose to write about, you know that it is significantly different from what the emphasis is on the en fr nl projects. African wikipedia do not start writing about America, France the Netherlands. They write about their country, their language, their government, their issues. Even with all the good intentions that we have, we cannot write a proper encyclopedia that is relevant in another culture. What we can do is enable people to write an encyclopedia in their own language.

Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Michael Becker wrote:

The following is a list of these languages in terms of the number of countries where each is spoken. The number that follows is the total number of countries that use that language (from Weber, 1997):

1. *English* (115)
2. *French* (35)
3. *Arabic* (24)
4. *Spanish* (20)
5. *Russian* (16)
6. *German* (9)
7. *Mandarin* (5)
8. *Portuguese* (5)
9. *Hindi/Urdu *(2)
10. *Bengali* (1)
11. *Japanese* (1)

Portuguese is spoken in seven countries: Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé, Angola, and Mozambique. I don't know if it's still being used in East Timor.

Bengali is used in two countries: India and Bangladesh.

Ec

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Mark Williamson wrote:

Most of the misleading official status goes to English, French, and Portuguese.

Russian also has some measure of this but it's at least spoken by a minority in all the independent nations where it's official.

ditto.

wikipedia is in the information business.

Cheers, Andy!

Andre Engels wrote:

Another issue that we found at least on the Dutch Wikipedia, is that Africa is rather underrepresented in the encyclopedia. Getting more articles on African subjects would benefit both Wikipedia as a whole and a specific project to get information to Africa.

A couple things I've discovered is that in African topics one has to go to those quaint old places called libraries (forget finding anything online), and one can get to the edge of current research very quickly. For English, there is the "Historical Dictionary" series which is very useful, but in their bibliographies you'll see comments like "only book on the subject".

The positive way to look at it is that it's an opportunity to make WP the must-use reference, with the only online info on a topic, while there are a thousand D-Day websites to "compete" with.

Stan

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Fred Bauder wrote:

Might try http://allafrica.com/

I use it a lot. Do not, however, use it for ==External links. allafrica.com are news aggregators (they do not write anything themselves) and after a few days the articles are only readable on a subscription basis.

Find the original material and link to that instead.

I agree with another poster who said that to access technical subjects (computers, science, voting systems?) a first-world language can be required.

For instance, KDE has a Xhosa translation. But a friend who is a native Xhosa speaker says the menus are very confusing - "Run" as in "Run this program" get translated to "Run away" or something. He says it is much easier to use the English menus.

Fault could be laid at the translators door, but often the concepts are not easily represented in African languages.

If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles, maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.

Andy's 2 cents ..

[[en:User:Wikiwizzy]]

Tomer Chachamu wrote:

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:32:59 +0200, Andy Rabagliati andyr@wizzy.com wrote:

...

If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles, maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.

I think not. As your KDE example showed, translation is far more complicated than simple dictionary lookups. Xhosa is only spoken by 7.9m speakers (mainly in South Africa) and with so few speakers (and so little commercial possibility for making a translator) I would imagine that Xhosa may never be able to be translated.

Actually, I just read that it is similar to Zulu, which probably adds some more "speakers". Still, I think development of a machine translation program is unlikely.

It may still be possible to do human translation though. As hard as translation is, I think translating 1000 articles from [x] to Xhosa may be easier, in terms of time and especially required research resources, than writing 1000 new articles in Xhosa. Since all the articles in all the languages are GFDL, this is a good way to bootstrap new Wikipedias if there's an interested translator. This has been going on on el: (Greek) for example.

It might also answer the question of how to get more diversity into languages with non-diverse speaker populations. Even if there's no Chinese (for example) who speak a particular language, it can still get the Chinese point of view if someone speaks Chinese and can translate information from zh:, or from some other Wikipedia (like en:) that Chinese editors.

Even the larger Wikipedias could benefit from some of this. I've translated several German Wikipedia articles to English, despite my terrible knowledge of German, simply because they had a lot more information on certain subjects (e.g. [[Gregor Gysi]]).

The ultimate vision, IMO, would be to have all Wikipedias have essentially the same content, just translated, rather than each one taking its own biased-towards-its-speakers viewpoint and focus.

-Mark

Tomer Chachamu wrote:

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:32:59 +0200, Andy Rabagliati andyr@wizzy.com wrote:

...

If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles, maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.

I think not. As your KDE example showed, translation is far more complicated than simple dictionary lookups. Xhosa is only spoken by 7.9m speakers (mainly in South Africa) and with so few speakers (and so little commercial possibility for making a translator) I would imagine that Xhosa may never be able to be translated.

Actually, I just read that it is similar to Zulu, which probably adds some more "speakers". Still, I think development of a machine translation program is unlikely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language

I fully agree with the fact that translation is far more compilcated than many think - babelfish does not at all do the trick ;-)

Never ever a machine will be able to translate correctly - not now, not tomorrow, not in 100 years - it's a dream many have - sorry, I must destroy it. A spoken and "living" language changes style and partly even writing and grammar at least every 20 years. It's an evolutionary process and a machine translator will only be as good as the human who fed it. It can give raw translations, but they will never be perfect. Often the same sentence used in another context needs a different translation as it has a different meaning. So whatever anyone thinks or belives: you will always need human beings to transmit a concept from one language to the other.

My 2 cts.

Sabine (professional translator - and not even a bit worrying about computers taking over high qualified work :-) go ahead programming machine translation software - thank you! - you help me to show that humans are the better translators and are woth every cent a customer pays :-)

Even if machine translation can reach such a level, there are still certain things about language that take a human to fix.

For example, if I translate a document from Chinese, it may be difficult to understand and seem unnatural, even though there are no real grammatical errors and all translations are technically correct. If I find this happens, I will go back and read the Chinese version, and rephrase the English translation into a more "English" way of saying the same thing.

There are also other issues, but most are very difficult to explain.

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:44:47 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Sabine Cretella wrote:

...

Never ever a machine will be able to translate correctly - not now, not tomorrow, not in 100 years - it's a dream many have - sorry, I must destroy it.

A pedantic point, but this is assuming that machines are not capable of human-level intelligence. Many in the AI community would beg to differ. =]

(Although whether it'll be 10, 20, 50, 100, or 500 years before an artificial intelligence can learn things like languages with the same or better aptitude as humans is a matter of debate.)

-Mark

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Delirium wrote:

Sabine Cretella wrote:

...

Never ever a machine will be able to translate correctly - not now, not tomorrow, not in 100 years - it's a dream many have - sorry, I must destroy it.

A pedantic point, but this is assuming that machines are not capable of human-level intelligence. Many in the AI community would beg to differ. =]

(Although whether it'll be 10, 20, 50, 100, or 500 years before an artificial intelligence can learn things like languages with the same or better aptitude as humans is a matter of debate.)

I would call Sabine's comment realistic rather than pedantic. I realize that technophiles dream of these artificial solutions, but the best they can realistically hope for is competent interpretation of technical material. When it comes to metaphor technophiles are playing in the right field of dreams. (I wonder how a machine would translate that into the language of people who know nothing about baseball.)

Ec

Yes, 7.9m people is so small... Wait Tomer, isn't your native language Hebrew? Remind me how many people speak Hebrew? Or do Xhosa speakers count for less because they're Africans?

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:20:32 +0000, Tomer Chachamu the.r3m0t@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:32:59 +0200, Andy Rabagliati andyr@wizzy.com wrote:

...

If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles, maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.

I think not. As your KDE example showed, translation is far more complicated than simple dictionary lookups. Xhosa is only spoken by 7.9m speakers (mainly in South Africa) and with so few speakers (and so little commercial possibility for making a translator) I would imagine that Xhosa may never be able to be translated.

Actually, I just read that it is similar to Zulu, which probably adds some more "speakers". Still, I think development of a machine translation program is unlikely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 01:42:39AM -0500, Delirium wrote:

speaking it, and would like it to be preserved. But it would be silly to argue that Greek ought to be one of the first languages being considered for a print version of Wikipedia. Not only are there many other languages with many more speakers, but many Greeks speak one of those other languages anyway (mostly English, with some German).

If you don't require it to be a print of the complete Wikipedia then German was the first to be printed last year. You just gotta have the content and find someone to print it. That's nowhere a political discussion but about a lot of work.

About language statistics: http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm

ciao, tom

Andy Rabagliati ha scritto:

One might take Swahili out, as many literate Swahili-speakers also speak English.

Is this criterion applicable outside Africa? That could be very interesting.

Ciao, Nino

Delirium ti 2005/2/23 ChS 01:16 sia-kong:

I'd question that: I think Africa is "best served" by whatever content the most people can read, which is likely to be English.

I'd like to hear the opinions of Africans on these issues, and not just the elites. My current opinion is that a Wikipedia limited only to a few European languages would be a disaster. They would likely serve, at best, only the top echelons of African societies, in the sense that "whatever content the most people can read" would automatically exclude those who cannot (currently) read. To this some Wikipedians might point out that the projects are meant only for the Internet-using population, and it is not our goal to disseminate knowledge beyond that limited population (globally speaking). My response would be that we should not assume Wikipedia would always remain textual. In order to disseminate knowledge to the rest of the population, recordings will eventually need to be made, initially on a selective basis. For that we need as many languages as practically possible and for which there are willing volunteers. At this very early stage in Wikimedia's development, urging editors to close ranks under the banners of a few mega-languages is in any case premature.

And by the way, a language with 8 million speakers is _not_ a small language at all.

To put matters into perspective, the following is an article describing how a US evangelical Christian group (related to the Ethnologue) is handling languages. They are currently proceeding at a rate of starting translations into 90 new language per year: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/002/28.74.html . Wikimedia is not out to save souls (or languages) but there is something about having a vision that is worth looking into.

Even expanding to say, four languages, the best choices are likely to be English, French, Arabic, and Swahili (although I can't find very good statistics on this). Unless you have a plan to simultaneously publish editions in 500 different languages, publishing in the major languages---i.e. those that the most people are able to make use of---seems like the best plan.

-Mark

Mark Williamson (node.ue@gmail.com) [050223 17:00]:

The problem is, "most of the world" - especially the most of the world without computers - doesn't speak English.

I suggest starting with what we have and going on from there would be a good start.

My point is, I would be heartbroken if English copies of Wikipedia print editions are handed out in schools on Hopi, or the school in Havasupai, or schools in the Tohono O'odham Nation or the Navajo Nation or the Gaeltachta.

Perhaps you can bring those wikipedias up to print quality as well.

- d.

--- Michael Bracker m-wikipedia@bracker.name wrote:

Daniel Mayer schrieb:

...

Numbers have been updated and corrected.

when do you think we can get the first figures from wikimedia Germany?

would be great if they could be included :-)

Hopefully soon. :)

-- mav

__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250

"Continuate cosi!" - Ivan Sassi "Vivent les systèmes libres!" - Martijn Coppoolse "Für eine tolles Projetk" - anon "Wikipedia ist eines der aktuellsten Nachschlagewerke." - Tobias Maurus "Kostenlos ist klasse. Aber es sollte nicht umsonst sein." - Andre Versuemer "Please don't go with google. - keep up the great work! Don't go with google please, stay independant!" - anon "und ein klares NEIN gegen Studiengebuehren" - Peer Johannes "Je serais trop malheureux de voir une telle entreprise faillir ou tomber en de mauvaises mains." - Benjamin Guillemain d'Echon "Ánimo, es un gran proyecto. ¡El conocimiento debe ser libre!" - anon "Seguir adelante con este inmenso proyecto..." - Josep Penella Sala "Don't move to Google!" - anonymous Polish donor "Wikipedia rulez. it:"Come sarebbe il mondo senza Wikipedia?"" - anon "Für eine der besten Ideen des Informationszeitalters" - Michael Schmitz

And, as yesterday, lots of "wieder so"s.

Mark

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:05:52 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:

On Day 4 (Monday 21 February eastern US timezone since PayPal data are not available in UTC) we made $6,586.15 (USD equivalent) through PayPal (no updates available for other sources at this time). This is a decrease of 16.44% from Day 3 but still does represent 18.34% of total funds collected so far ($35,904.88 ; only counting full days) and 8.78% of our goal ($75,000).

Remarkably, the rate of donations were not too adversely affected by the downtime today. Since the donation forms were not available during a large part of the downtime, I can only guess that people remembered our PayPal account name.

Donations did significantly increase soon after a Slashdot story about the downtime was released (9:28PM, EST), forcing us to move the backup donation page once the Slashdot Effect brought down the website hosting it (http://wikisearch.org ; Sorry about that Angela).

Day 4 Day 3 comparison Breakdown: PayPal USD equiv USD equiv %change AUD 32 $25.30 $330.90 -92.36% CAD 785 $636.09 $238.93 166.23% EUR 1489.63 $1,947.24 $2,755.66 -29.34% GBP 332.06 $630.18 $696.89 -9.57% JPY 8501 $80.58 $198.96 59.50% USD 3266.76 $3,266.76 $3,596.33 -9.16% PayPal total: $6,586.15 $7,817.66 -15.75%

MoneyBookers $64.00 -100.00%

    TOTAL   $6,586.15       $7,881.66       -16.44%

Grand totals so far (only counting complete days)

PayPal USD equiv %GrandTotal AUD 1150.4 $909.39 2.53% CAD 1571.01 $1,272.99 3.55% EUR 9926.89 $12,976.44 36.14% GBP 1952.46 $3,705.39 10.32% JPY 82302.58 $780.15 2.17% USD 15833.85 $15,833.85 44.10% PayPal total: $35,478.19

Moneybookers: $426.69 1.19%

GRAND TOTAL $35,904.88 100.00%

% toward goal 47.87%

For the most recent grand total and other details visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1 (once everything is back up)

Some selected comments from Day 4: See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1/Day_4 in about a day (hopefully I'll be able to post by then)

"I love this site. Keep up the awesome work!" by Anonymous

"I use Wiki - I have to pay for it !" by Immo Wetzel

"You have aided me countless times in my academic pursuits in math, science, and the humanities. I can't thank you guys enough." by Laura Napolitano

"Wiki is the future!" by Christoph Burschka

"Wikipedia is in my opinion one of the most noble collective human endeavours underway in the world today. Thank you so much for contributing to society with your wonderful website. I love it and abide" by Matthew Barba

"Wikimedia Rocks!" by Jasmeet Singh

"I have always had a thirst for knowledge, and this project does more than quench it. I am happy to donate." by Matthew Gluesenkamp

"Cheaper than cable" by Anonymous

Some of my favorites:

"Spread your Squids around the world. And use cached pages for logged in users as well. Fix those and I'll be happy as a [[clam]]. Good job so far!!!" by Rami Lehti

"A small price to pay for a project like this. But get a move on with all those ambitious plans for paper versions. Most of the world doesn't have computers." by Anonymous

"The Wikimedia Foundations is an acheivement of great proportions spreading the one firm truth that information is truly free. Thank you." by Siddharth Bhansali

"Help preserve the sum total of human knowledge for less than the price of two Caramel Frappuccinos. Wikipedia is not only fat-free and carbohydrate-free, it will never go straight to your hips!" by Jonet Greene

"Give Wiki a boost!!" by Kiminori Noma

Daniel Mayer, Wikimedia CFO

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