[Foundation-l] Fundraising totals as of Nov. 15, 2007 @ 12:20 PM (EST)

[Lars Aronsson]

> > > Currency      Number of
> > > Contributions         Amount of
> > > Contributions
> > > in USD        Average
> > > in USD
> > > Total         22763   681,388.14      29.93
> > > AUD   479     13,694.51       28.59
> > > BGN   3       29.18   9.73
> > > CAD   712     22,477.91       31.57

> > > Click here to read more on our site
> > > <http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/forward/emailref/22>

Just for fun, I correlated these preliminary donation statistics 
with the population and GDP for each country.  Of course, this is 
very crude, since it equates donations in a currency with 
donations coming from a particular country.  But anyway, this 
allows me to roughly compare my own country (Sweden) with my 
closest neighbors (Norway and Denmark).

Switzerland is a top ranking donor nation, with US$ 1588 per 
million capita.  For every billion dollars of GDP in Switzerland, 
45 dollars were donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.  However, the 
Swiss franc might be an international currency used by more people 
than live in the country.  And the same goes for the US dollars. 
The Wikimedia Foundation has received US$ 31 for every billion 
dollars of United States GDP.

Sweden and Norway donate 17/billion GDP, but Denmark only donates 
12/billion.  This can probably be explained by the higher activity 
on the Swedish and Norwegian language Wikipedias, whereas the 
Danish language Wikipedia is lagging behind.

Finland has adopted the Euro currency, so tracing donations by 
currency is not possible.  I don't know the GDP figure for the 
Euro zone, but if I use the GDP of the entire European Union, this 
becomes 10/billion. The true value should be between 10 and 20. 
Britain donates 16/billion, so a little behind Sweden and Norway, 
but clearly ahead of Denmark.  However, Canada and Australia 
donate 19/billion.

You might think it is unfair to compare Poland to Scandinavia, 
since they were behind the iron curtain until 1990 and still only 
has half of the Scandinavian GDP per capita.  But the Polish 
language Wikipedia is doing very well.  And still WMF only 
receives 3/billion.  In contrast, the Czech donate 6/billion. 
Hungarians only donate 1.7/billion.

So, trying to compare equals:

 * Denmark could do better, to catch up with Sweden and Norway.

 * Hungary and Poland could do better, to catch up with the Czech.

 * Britain could do better, to catch up with Canada and Australia.

And finally: All could do better. WMF is currently collecting 
between 1 and 45 dollars for every *billion* dollars of GDP.

These are the numbers I used for this non-scientific comparison:

Currency; Population (million); GDP (billion US$)

USD	298.4	12980
EUR	320	14953
GBP	60.6	2375
CAD	33.1	1165
JPY	127.4	4220
AUD	21.1	718.4
CHF	7.5	264.1
SEK	9.1	285.1
NOK	4.77	213.6
DKK	5.47	256.3
PLN	38.5	631.8
SGD	4.68	137.7
HKD	6.92	263.1
CZK	10.3	236.5
NZD	4.2	108.8
HUF	10.1	208.2
ZAR	47.9	587.5
RON	22.3	256.9
BGN	7.68	87.2
ILS	7.2	170.3
TWD	22.9	355.7
EEK	1.34	26.85


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se