Walter Vermeir wrote: A few points: -- Paypal does not require a credit card. You can make direct bank transfers as well. -- Credit cards are not expensive -- they are entirely free. I certainly don't pay anything at all for any of mine (and you don't pay interest if you pay your bills on time either). They're essentially the same as a debit card, but more secure (if there's a dispute with a dishonest merchant, you don't pay until the dispute is resolved, while with a debit card they already have your money, and you don't get it back until the dispute is resolved -- also by law in the US at least, the consumer is only responsible for up to $50 of credit card fraud). -- In the US at least, most debit cards work through the credit card system as well. They're treated as debit, but you can use them in a credit card reader just fine. On the other hand, the expenses are all currently in the US, so the currency will have to be converted at some point to US$. This would also require a resident of Europe to handle the bank account and to periodically mail checks to Jimbo (or bank transfer the funds to a US account, which probably isn't free). -Mark

Till Westermayer wrote: I was unable to find any more information by logging in either. The "add a checking account" section doesn't specifically say anything about it being a US checking account, but since it knows I'm from the US it may be displaying the "US version" of the page to me. Perhaps a euro-zone Wikipedian with a paypal account could investigate? Yeah, I'm not too familiar with them. I do recall that many places in Belgium did accept credit cards last time I visited, particularly restaurants (Diner's Club seems particularly popular there, while it's rather unpopular in the US, but I saw plenty of MasterCard, Visa, and American Express signs in restaurant and shop windows as well). Oddly it was my *debit* card that wouldn't work (the US and European debit card networks must not be interconnected). What is the usual procedure in the Euro-zone for ordering stuff online, e.g. from amazon.de? Do you enter a debit number with PIN, or do a bank transfer? Yeah, if there's a lot of donations from euro-zone Wikipedians, a bulk currency conversion may get us a better rate than converting each transaction to US$, so this might be something to consider. It may complicate the legal situation though -- is Wikipedia, as a US soon-to-be-501(c)(3) corporation, allowed to have euro-zone bank accounts? If not, we could have a euro-zone individual create a bank account to collect money in the name of Wikipedia, and then transfer it to the US foundation, but that may (or may not) be complicated legally (on that matter I have no knowledge). -Mark

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . . Hi Delirium, Any euro-zone PayPal Wikipedian who can say something on this? Maybe I should be more precise next time: a lot of shops and restaurants accept credit cards, but they are not that common in the sense that most people only use them for business transactions and travel, but not in daily-use. Most people own a bank-issued debit card ("EC" card). I do bank transfer, that is, amazon.de has an option that it can withdraw (is that the term?) money from my bank account, I use this. IIRC, this direct bank account transfer system was made part of amazon.de because credit card shopping is not so common in Germany, especially (like Erik Zachte said for the Netherlands, IIRC), because many don't believe in internet security. If paypal includes a possibility to pay with such a system, that would be a good thing. PINs together with EC (debit) cards are only used at ATMs, and in shops (with small card-readers-cum-numeric-keyboard). HTH, __ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .

"Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote in message news:20030822075641.P23554@joey.bomis.com... http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_help-ext&eloc=0&loc=281&a… e=_home&flow= You have to pay a $1.95 fee to sign up if you live outside the US. They were very sneaky about it. You click on "sign up for your FREE PayPal account", then you read the contract carefully (no mention of this behaviour), you give them all your details and your credit card number, and then they say "congratulations you have created a PayPal account", but when you try to send money, they tell you that you have a transaction limit of $0, with an extra $0 per month, and that you have to enrol for "expanded use" if you want to raise it. To do this, you pay them $1.95, then wait for your next credit card statement which contains the secret number, which you then type in. I finally found the place where they tell you about this behaviour, hidden amongst the multitude of claims that it is free to sign up and free to send: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ua/policy_payments-outside At this point I got rather annoyed and closed my account, with some nasty comments in the "why are you leaving us" form. Sorry Wikimedia. -- Tim Starling

Walter Vermeir wrote: O.k., can anyone recommend a large and reputable 'euro-zone' bank where I can open an account from here? Do other people have feedback for me on whether this is a sensible thing to do? One problem with what you've said, though, is that I don't foresee much of a need for the Wikimedia Foundation to *spend* Euros in the short term. There is sometimes talk of locating a server in Europe, but I'm unconvinced that there are good technical reasons for doing so. (But, if there are, I'm all for it.) Other than that, I'll be buying machines in California. --Jimbo

Gustav Foseid wrote: If you're reading the mailing lists through the gmane newsgroup gateway, beware that it corrupts its copy of postings by obscuring things it thinks are e-mail addresses. The address given in the above e-mail is in fact 'd o n a t i o n at-sign w i k i p e d i a dot o r g'. There is no public.gmane.org involved. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Gustav Foseid wrote: I agree with you, although I do note that Paypal claims to work perfectly fine in most (not all) European and Asian countries. If there are other services in Europe or Asia that (a) are popular and easier to use for people there, and (b) easy for me to set up, then please let me know. --Jimbo

Well, as is well known, it's the secret ambition of every capitalist oppressor such as myself to have a Swiss bank account, so perhaps I should make an effort to open one for Wikimedia Foundation when I am in Germany next year. :-) --Jimbo

Yes, but I don't understand what you're saying. Maybe if you are reading through gmane they are mangling the address somehow? The correct address is: donation -at- wikipedia.org. I will be adding donation -at- wikipediafoundation.org as soon as I have access to that, probably later today (thanks, mav!). Gustav Foseid wrote:

Gustav Foseid wrote: Why don't we turn that feature off? It's clear that it can cause confusion, and we don't mangle addresses in the web archives of the lists. -M-

"Walter Vermeir" &lt;walter(a)wikipedia.be&gt; wrote in message news:bie2fj$qs5$1@sea.gmane.org... not The entire list is archived on the web with email addresses unencrypted, at mail.wikipedia.org. It's even indexed in Google. The only thing the encryption does is annoy people. I say turn it off. The encryption of "from" addresses should stay on, because they're also hidden in the archive. Just the encryption in the email body should be turned off. -- Tim Starling <tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau> =======@=======

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 02:50:59 +0200, Paul Ebermann &lt;Paul-Ebermann(a)gmx.de&gt; gave utterance to the following: So the archive should be taken offline until it can be rewritten with all email addresses either encrypted or munged (global substitution of the last four characters of any string containing @ other than in the first or last character with .... should work. The address I post to these groups with is spam free, and I'd like to keep it that way because the traffic is far to high to have to pass it through mailwasher. -- Richard Grevers Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried