Daniel Lange's blog

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation behind Wikipedia, is running their annual fund raiser since October 22nd. There have been numerous complaints that the Wikimedia Foundation did not name a target sum to be achieved or is in other way acting intransparent. There may be good reasons for that:

• The last fund raiser was "tough" to get through already and raised about one million dollars with $20 average contribution as to what Bruno Giussani reported from Lift '07.
• The foundation grew from $56,666 turn-over in it's fiscal year 2003/2004 to $283,487 (2004/2005) and $1,066,785 (2005/2006). The 2006/2007 figures are still not reported, but it's safe to estimate that the 4x increase of the previous year has slowed down a bit.(see Updates section below) See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Finance_report for the scarce details.
• The budget planning for fiscal year 2007/2008 totals $4.611m. The break-down is very rough and little effort is spent to explain the figures to the general public.
• The suggested donations have been set high at $200 to $40 with marketdroid speak to sell that:
  "If you and 99 other people donate .. $200 – We can ...".
• It's not very likely a target in the range of the planned budget can be achieved from Joe, Dick and Harry's contributions. Wikimedia may need Larry, Sergey or Mark here. (I'll leave that without links for you to think about )

So - to make the best of this - and continue being unnecessarily intransparent, Wikimedia (cough Jimmy Wales, cough) has decided to only list the number of donors as the "progress report".

Their "meter" currently looks like this:

You can easily analyse the scale to find that Wikimedia hopes 100.000 people will contribute.

Continue reading "Wikimedia Fundraiser Analysis"