Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-06-27/Directed donations

The administration of the Wikimedia Foundation was a topic of some discussion recently with a proposal for earmarking donations, while the election for two seats on the Board of Trustees starts this week after two candidates jumped into the race at the last minute.

Grants Coordinator Danny Wool proposed that instead of having all donations go into the general fund, donors should be allowed to earmark their donations for a specific purpose. He suggested that in order to account for overhead costs of running the Foundation, ten percent of earmarked donations would still be deducted to cover such costs.

This system of handling donations would allow small donors, who make up the bulk of the Wikimedia Foundation's financial support, to pool resources in a manner similar to large grant-making organizations. Sj suggested that the earmarking scheme should be kept simple, using broad categories like "hardware", "software", and "language development".

Reactions to earmarking proposal
Trustee Angela Beesley asked whether the proposal would not create a huge imbalance in favor of the English Wikipedia, as it receives the most visits of any project. Many people, she suggested, might "decide to put all their donations towards that project rather than the Foundation's wider goals". However, Wool indicated that he had more focused targets in mind for earmarking, not simply promoting development of particular Wikipedia languages.

The response from Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer was skeptical. He said that feedback from donors should be collected, but it "should not tie the hands of the board". Mayer pointed out that fundraising drives are held after a budget is drafted and the budget is mentioned as part of the fundraising, giving potential donors an idea of how the money would be used.

One major question was how the process of tracking such donations would work. It might be possible if the Foundation began using direct processing of credit card payments, as an appropriate form could be designed. However, while this method of accepting donations was reportedly imminent several months ago (see archived story), it still has not been implemented. According to Mayer, the current donation setup emphasizing PayPal allows only two options on their form data, which limits its usefulness for this purpose.

For the time being, the proposal remains up in the air. Beesley suggested having a meeting of the grants committee to further refine and develop the idea before putting it into effect.

Six candidates in election
In other news related to the Foundation, two additional candidates joined the race for the Board of Trustees, in addition to the four who had already declared (see archived story). The new candidates are Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, better known to many as Cimon avaro, and Samuel Klein, generally known on Wikipedia as sj.

This leaves a total of six candidates running for the two positions representing the community on the Board of Trustees. Voting was to begin Tuesday, 28 June, although at last report this might be delayed slightly due to the ongoing software upgrade (see related story) and because the voting interface was still being translated into additional languages. The election is scheduled to run through Monday, 11 July. The winners, to be chosen by approval voting (thus allowing voters to cast ballots for as many of the candidates as they wish), will serve for two-year terms.