[Wikipedia-l] Donation History

[Daniel Mayer]

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)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree