Topic: Getting Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin donations - Community pledge - page 3. (Read 19110 times)

To me it just seems right that Wikipedia should accept Bitcoin. We love Wikipedia and we love Bitcoin and they will work well together. "I'm tired of wanting Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin, I want Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin."

Everyone knows Wikipedia and new people hearing about Bitcoin will have a much more accurate perception about it if they know that it accepts Bitcoin donations.

It's a high-hanging fruit, sure, but it's well worth the effort.

I don't know how to quantify any of this, though.

The trouble is very organization-dependent. Sending an email to Bitpay asking to be hooked up with a direct deposit donation address is easy. But the various legal, accounting and ethical qualms depend very much on the scale and structure of the organization.

We can use the number of people familiar with an organization as a metric for judging the worth of getting it on board; I think the worth will be superlinear in that metric.

By Jimmy's word, which I believe, they have made such studies, and they do A/B testing for each new method they add. I don't know if they're willing to share the results of these studies. I agree this seems odd given that they accept some esoteric donation methods, but they say these has been tested to increase total proceeds.

I agree completely that we should offer to sponsor research on including Bitcoin donations, but the current pledged amount isn't sufficient for that.

Importantly, having a separate, orphan Bitcoin donation page will cause them less trouble in this aspect, and is satisfactory.

An ambitious goal will be to explain Bitcoin to them to the point that they're willing to make such a value judgement. A more conservative goal is to convince them that accepting Bitcoin donations would not be such a statement.

For reasons stated above I believe Wikipedia is a good target. Other goals can also be pursued of course, but I don't think the lessons learned from this are very transferable.

I don't see how going meta can help, and it can also be perceived as WP:POINT. Our method should not be to antagonize the decision makers at Wikimedia.

So they have concerns about BTC, but none about paid admins?
Yeah, sounds just like the usual Wikiganda.

Why is Wikipedia accepting bitcoin so important? This detail needs to be quantified and qualified. Is there not any other lower hanging fruit than Wikipedia?

It seems out of your list that item 3 is the real reason for their concern: "Accepting bitcoins can be perceived as making a value judgement about Bitcoin, which they are hesitant to do."

Item 1: Apparently, we need to quantify how much "trouble" it is to accept money. I am serious. This not just an issue at Wikipedia but will be an issue for any charity/organization. Quantifying the "worth", well, what is the worth of Wikipedia? That is a "value judgement" about Wikipedia and is best left to each individual, but I can say, Wikipedia's worth is probably much greater than the amount of donations they receive. Don't get me wrong, I think a community pledge has its merits.

Item 2: "Choice paralysis"... a study should be conducted to quantify this claim; possibly a similar study has already been conducted and has been published somewhere. But on the surface, it seems that Wikipedia does not worry too much about this as they already except payments through moneybookers.com (Skrill). In other words, this argument is a smoke screen. As a community, we should incur the cost of this study (i.e., testing), not Wikipedia. And this study should be unbiased and published appropriately.

Item 3: Being switzerland is just good policy... You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink it. And you may never really know the real reason why. It may be that buying Linden dollars on Second Life with real money makes some people's stomachs churn.

It may be more valuable to target lower hanging fruit and use the resources on conducting studies to prove our point.

As for Wikipedia, I proposed a different approach here... which is basically to use the fundamentals of Wikipedia (i.e., to document history) against itself approach. We can not put Wikipedia in the history of bitcoin right now, but we can put them in as the quintessential charity that does not accept bitcoin.

Thoughts?

Agree.
I think I'm gonna send a few bitcoins to Jimmy Wales that way though. Just to make him try and hopefully make him change his mind about bitcoin 

I'm not sure they're allowed to accept donations this way. And AFAIK this (unlike Bitpay's proxy) doesn't automate conversion to USD, which they need.

Also, we want them to officially accept Bitcoin donations.

Why not sending the bitcoins directly on twitter via Pikapay?

https://twitter.com/Wikimedia

Or even better, directly to Jimmy Wales!

https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales



 

That's good advice, which is why I spend time writing lengthy OPs and engaging in discussion with commenters. As has been explained already,

We wait until they no longer refuse.

We continue waiting. Of course, this makes this unattractive to someone who believes it's likely it will take many years.

There needs to be an official, public indication that they're accepting Bitcoin donations (or a private statement that they'd like to use funds to research this possibility). This needn't necessarily be in the form of publishing a Bitcoin address, e.g. if they want to use a payment processor.

Think of situations and I'll clarify what will be done.

Not by any means an outright endorsement, but I just wanted to counteract some of the skeptical tone of my previous post - I hadn't spent the time to read up, just saw a thread saying "give me your money" (with no proof of credibility) and a bunch of punters saying "ok". To save other doubters from doing their own basic research:
He has done some good stuff https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=121314.20
It looks like he has done this before and succeeded https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4711.20
But keep in mind he has his doubters (like just about everyone else) https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unofficial-bitdaytrade-deposit-claims-thread-113369

So I think he has good intentions, but I also think it's a terrible idea to send money somewhere without a clear explanation of what will happen in various contingency situations (wikimedia outright refuses to accept, wikimedia takes forever to accept, wikimedia offers to accept "privately" without publishing a bitcoin address on their site.... and other situations you might think of). Just my 2 cents.

I'm very well known on here, and very trustworthy.

All due respect to John K but

1. Why do you think it is a good policy to trust a single person with everything? There are many people here with solid reputations, if you always go to the same person and he's sitting on 1000's of BTC, how sure are you his reputation is worth more than that?

2. Why would he even agree? In his usual escrow deals, he holds funds for a limited amount of time and takes a fee for it. Here he would hold funds for an indefinite period of time and get nothing for it - and it would be another liability in addition to all his others. I'm enthusiastic about starting the dialogue with Wikimedia and believe in the role of a pledge in this, so I'm willing to do it, despite all the risks and stress. Would he?

Anyway, after discussion with some people here I understand that the importance of the pledge is not as big as I originally thought, which is why I didn't push this further. But seeing that people are still hung up on this, I've contacted John to see if he's interested.

Why not? That's the most effective approach, so that's my plan.

If either
1. Wikipedia doesn't accept donations and I move the coins (to anything other than an agreed-upon new collection address)
2. Wikipedia accepts donations and I don't donate them.
For #1, it wouldn't be a very good scam if I'm holding coins and can never do anything with them. And I'm hoping it won't take long until they accept it.

LOL

This definitely should be via an address controlled by JohnK, not by Meni. No offence Meni, but JohnK is very well known on here, and very trustworthy, and I sure as heck wouldn't trust someone who was planning to hold my coins in a wallet address he / she controlled for an indeterminate amount of time.

Put yourself in someone else's shoes - how could you ever be shown to be a scammer if there is no committed time for you to donate (given that wikimedia has no current plans to accept bitcoin)?

The private key is not going to be given to Wikimedia. (I mean, when this ends they can have it if they want, but why would they want it?)

I will simply send the funds collected in the address to Wikipedia. Ideally they'll list a static public donation address and the blockchain will record that funds were sent to that address. Otherwise I'll request some confirmation from them that I sent the funds.

Of course once this happens any future funds should be donated to Wikimedia directly rather than through any of our treasurers.

They said many things. We want to convince them to change their mind...

Did you read the OP?

Honestly, you're right about that.  I forget sometimes that not everyone is a programmer like me.  If I had more time on my hands right now I'd volunteer to make a site like this, because it could be really useful in a lot of ways.  But just like you, I don't have the time, and so it's really not my place to criticize you in this regard.  So, I apologize for being a bit of a jerk about it.

I still think that holding a donation "ransom" is a bad idea, but I respect that you're trying to organize an effort to get Wikipedia to change their ways instead of just emailing them and giving up like everyone else.  I definitely hope that you achieve your goal! 

Setting up such a website and securing it properly is at least a day's work if I were to do it, or several hours by someone more proficient in such matters (volunteers? Anyone?). Not that much in the grand scheme of things, but definitely time that could have been used for better purposes.

The result would be a system that is more troublesome for donators (instead of choosing a treasurer and sending to a simple public address, they'd need to fill a form on an external website and send to a unique address) and much harder to audit - instead of a single address per treasurer, which can be viewed for total amount collected and activity, funds are scattered among addresses. And the chance of loss or theft of funds would be higher.

KISS.

If only there was some way to easily automate this type of thing.  Like a way to I dunno, tell a computer what to do?  Maybe some type of "code" that the computer could understand.  And we could have a base for storing all the data, a "database" if you will.  I bet millions of people all over the world could use such things to turn "logistics nightmares" into solved problems. 

Heck, maybe someday someone could even create a currency of sorts using these tools and solve the "logistics nightmare" of tracking hundreds of transactions per day.

We can dream.

Creating nLockTime transactions isn't exactly a widely available feature.

Surely there's some clever way to use nLockTime to make a contract that will accomplish this automatically?

It takes just one person to point to this thread to prove I have stolen funds. Do you really think there is any chance everyone will just forget about this - ever?

That's a logistics nightmare and discourages small donations.

Also, it is better to be in it for the long haul, collecting more funds over time, than to quit and start over if the first time it doesn't succeed.

So if Wikimedia never accepts bitcoin donations (or does so in the very distant future), the funds fall away into relative obscurity.  Once everyone has forgotten about them, you're free to do with them as you wish. 

It's intriguing that you're taking this route rather than say automatically refunding donators if a year has passed with no progress towards Wikimedia accepting bitcoin donations.  All you have to do is track who donates what and ask for a refund address. 

They will stay right where they are (unless I have to move them in their entirety to another address for security purposes).

The "goal" is that Wikimedia will accept Bitcoin donations. I don't find it plausible it will never happen, regardless of reaching any pledge targets.

Interesting.  What will you do with the funds if the goal is never reached?