Moreover, because fundraising reports are now so stingy, we can't even
know the (per-country) effects of such decisions (cc fundraiser@), hence
public accountability is impossible.
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https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fundraising/2013-14_Repor…
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https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2012/Report#Totals_by_coun…
Nemo
Lodewijk, 17/11/2014 20:28:
A while back now, the chapters were no longer allowed
to fundraise, because
the Wikimedia Foundation argued they would be better able to do this. At
the time, this sounded somewhat reasonable. However, since then, there have
been some disturbing developments - at least for Dutch donors.
No longer it is possible to pay electronically (iDEAL, one of the most
common methods is no longer supported - 'electronic banking' simply refers
you back to the credit card page) or even via regular bank transfer (using
an IBAN) in the Netherlands. The donation page
<https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPage&country=NL&uselang=en&utm_medium=spontaneous&utm_source=fr-redir&utm_campaign=spontaneous>
only
allows credit card and paypal, and the 'other ways to give' simply sends
you to the helpdesk if you want to make a bank transfer payment.
What is the reasoning behind this? Have bank transfers become a legal
swamp? Are there statistics suggesting that this method was no longer
required by donors? Did the European bank account somehow get temporarily
suspended?
If it has become so hard to donate, maybe it makes more sense to send the
donors to the local chapter pages where they can actually donate in the
local suitable methods (in this case, Wikimedia Netherlands offers both
iDEAL and IBAN
<http://www.wikimedia.nl/pagina/doneren-aan-wikimedia-nederland>).
One of the Dutch OTRS team members asked for elaboration, but didn't quite
get a satisfying answer. I hope this is a temporary situation, and that
this threshold will be removed again. It would be sad if we go through all
kind of trouble to enable long tail methods like bitcoin, but skip bank
transfer...
Best,