Talk:Task force/Recommendations/Financial sustainability 2

Donations

I support continued supporting of Wikimedia via donations. Especially if partially backed by an endowment to cover some of the costs and reduce the fluxtuations in donations. Ingolfson 00:50, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Donations / ads for third parties

Wikipedia has the ability to save countless lives. All it has to do is put on some ads and give the proceeds to charity. A decision by Wikimedia to do this would be a strong statement for what it ultimately stands for and probably the right thing to do.

And yes, two issues do arise. The first being opening the door to potential bias created by the fact that money is flowing in from sponsors and the second being the impossibility for a person to be unbiased in choosing a charity to donate proceeds to.

But if you believe in the principles that led to the belief that a system like Wikipedia could exist in the first place (think Friedrich Hayek), then maybe those two issues could be addressed with the application of the same principles.

At the very least take a poll and see that most people would agree that if in the end even just one life is saved as a result, it would be a worthwhile project.

Uhm, actually I don't think we should branch out into charity work. We aid humanity enough if we concentrate on our core mission of making knowledge accessible. Diluting that is bad sense. Ingolfson 00:51, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Income: make donation effect person-sized

I'd like to see a banner for logged-in users that gives something like a bar chart displaying

---------------------------------
your share for this year $16.52 |             Click here to change the way your share is calculated
---------------------------------             or to remove this banner
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your donations for this year $20.00 |
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Wikipedia can operate for 17 months based on the current level of donations collected.

The fund-raising campaigns just display the total needed, which, unless you are very wealthy is too large for an individual, even in a rich country, to consider donating. It would be nice to see what I need to give in order to do my part and see that I had done it.

Default share calculation could be weighted by country currently connecting from (using a GeoIP type service) with $$\begin{gathered} \frac{fraction \\ of \\ world \\ monetary \\ resources \\ in \\ country}{number \\ of \\ unique \\ visitors \\ from \\ country \\ in \\ a \\ year\times fraction \\ of \\ donors \\ in \\ country}(money \\ needed \\ this \\ year) \end{gathered}$$

I like that. I'd love to see how my donation helps... but is by country the best way to do it? 71.230.115.197 23:08, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Mmmh, not too bad as a fundraising idea, but this isn't really a policy issue, is it? 125.237.22.236 00:49, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

More prominent location for donate link

If the "donate" link were at the top of the navigation bar, that might increase thoughts about donating. Yearly donations from individuals will probably be lower than it costs to subscribe to the more trusted encyclopedias. Use of the sites needs to a pleasant experience for people to consider donating, and that includes trust in the articles and how easy they are to read. If the mission is to be for-free encyclopedias, rather than "encyclopedias for editing," then investing some of the revenue might eventually make a budget for a real edititorial staff possible. Grant writing from government is the best bet because rich people would just subscribe to one of the old encyclopedias. --Chuck Marean 20:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)