[Wikimedia-l] An idea that may improve Wikipedia's fundraising

[Matthew Walker]

Ziyuan,

Thanks for the idea! :)

Technology limitations aside, there are two things we throw around in the
team a lot; that we should not give the impression that a user *must* pay
to use a WMF property, and that we will never ever do gift premiums.

>From my perspective buying a DVD set sounds scarily close to having to pay
for the content and even if it doesn't fall under that category that it
would fall under the shadow of gift premiums.

In addition what use would giving a donor a DVD set serve? They clearly
already have access to the site -- with the caveat that some countries have
restricted use restrictions from the local government. If instead we are
talking about donating them for the purposes of expanding our reach into
countries where we presently have limited participation; it seems the
current strategy is to convince local mobile carriers to support Wikimedia
Zero.

Taking into account technology -- I am unsure that spending the money to
develop the infrastructure would be offset by the amount of interest we
would have. Think also that although the shop will ship something for 15
USD, that's actually a subsidized rate for most international destinations.
My guess is that we would be looking at more than 50$ a set, just for
production and shipping, before getting anywhere near breaking even.

~Matt Walker
Wikimedia Foundation
Fundraising Technology Team


On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
kwwilliams at kwwilliams.com> wrote:

> Op 2013/08/06 9:40, Ziyuan Yao schreef:
>
>  The key point in my original idea is that you make buyers believe that
>> they're not just giving money away, but also getting some "solid value" in
>> return. A Wikipedia DVD is a kind of "solid value".
>>
> More like a complete set of Wikipedia Blu-Rays. I forget the actual byte
> count of Wikipedia these days, but it's well over anything you would want
> to try to store on DVDs.
>
> KWW
>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.**org <Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@**lists.wikimedia.org<wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org>
> ?subject=**unsubscribe>
>