[Foundation-l] Open and transparency or not

[Tomasz Finc]

Let me jump in since I was the one who moved it. 

At the end of the 2009 Fundraiser we were getting hit by a significant amount of fraudulent transactions. It got so bad that the WMF had to dedicate full time staff members to respond to the massive amount of email and phone calls we were getting from confused card holders. As a result we had to turn off the gateway post fundraiser.

Many months later in preparation for the 2010 Fundraiser we started a fraud prevention project since allowing credit card donations provided us significant boost to the annual fundraiser.

We publicly posted about it at http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering and came up with a solution that removed almost all of the fraud we were seeing.

One of the things that was mentioned to us as we were working on the project was to not give fraudsters the exact recipe of how the system worked. Since we knew that we'd be checking our code into the production svn depots we chose to move the project page to somewhere that was not available to fraudsters. This wasn't done to prevent anyone from participating as we posted on the blog in order to keep everyone updated. 

As a community that strives on assuming good faith lets focus our efforts on thinking that everyone who genuinely participates at any level of the Wikimedia movement does so because they are trying to help.

I think Platonides comment at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/70919#c9972 provides us with the most amount of guidance. He pointed out that the extension is actually able to run on newer python versions and that there were no immediate impediments to its usage. 

As everyone knows, putting on the annual fundraiser is an enormous amount of work. I'm ridiculously proud of what awjrichards, kaldari, and the tons of community members have been able to pull off in the short amount of time that we've had. That key piece info from Platonides came after our priorities had shifted and we haven't had any breather since. As our priorities shift relative to what the fundraiser requires we'll be working actively to fix this but as a community we shouldn't think of this as a bottleneck. 

--tomasz

On Nov 13, 2010, at 6:17 PM, a b wrote:

> Interesting..... users/developers comment on the inclusion of reCATCHPA
> within the fund-raising[1] code since other projects have been they can't
> utilize its services then ~two weeks later (which isn't all that long in wmf
> time) its project documentation is moved off wiki (mw wiki) into the
> office[2] wiki which is private to WMF staff members only....
> 
> I will let everybody think about that.
> 
> [1]. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/70919
> [2].
> http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Payment_Fraud_Prevention&action=historysubmit&diff=349338&oldid=346607
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