Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on August 08, 2013, 07:09:46 PM

Most of us will agree that having the Wikimedia foundation (known for operating Wikipedia) accept Bitcoin donations could be a very important milestone in Bitcoin's adoption. They are famous for having refused for a long time with obscure reasons, but I believe they are warming up to the idea, and that it's high time we take concrete action about it.

Why is Wikipedia accepting bitcoin so important? This detail needs to be quantified and qualified. Is there not any other lower hanging fruit than Wikipedia?

Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on August 08, 2013, 07:09:46 PM

In a recent discussion on Quora, Jimmy Wales has stated a few reasons to reject Bitcoin donations, and surprisingly they were all quite tangible. By this point it is already assumed that the donations will be immediately converted to USD via a provider such as BitPay, to help with accounting and make it easier to use the funds. The main objections were:

1. The amount that would be donated via Bitcoin is too small to be worth the trouble.

This objection is the easiest to refute; all we need is to demonstrate the quantitative aspects of our willingness to donate, and this is what this post is mostly about.

2. Adding more donation options is known to create "choice paralysis" and decrease the total amount donated. They have a process of A/B testing for measuring the effect of adding new options; this testing will increase the cost of even considering to add this option.

To this Jimmy suggested that they could add information about Bitcoin donations in a separate page not linked to from the main donations page. I find this to be a very acceptable compromise; we'll be able to donate, and we'll be able to tell people Wikipedia accepts Bitcoin donations.

3. Accepting bitcoins can be perceived as making a value judgement about Bitcoin, which they are hesitant to do.

I believe this can be alleviated with proper framing, and that making this available only from an orphan page will further reduce the perceived impact.

It seems out of your list that item 3 is the real reason for their concern: "Accepting bitcoins can be perceived as making a value judgement about Bitcoin, which they are hesitant to do."

Item 1: Apparently, we need to quantify how much "trouble" it is to accept money. I am serious. This not just an issue at Wikipedia but will be an issue for any charity/organization. Quantifying the "worth", well, what is the worth of Wikipedia? That is a "value judgement" about Wikipedia and is best left to each individual, but I can say, Wikipedia's worth is probably much greater than the amount of donations they receive. Don't get me wrong, I think a community pledge has its merits.

Item 2: "Choice paralysis"... a study should be conducted to quantify this claim; possibly a similar study has already been conducted and has been published somewhere. But on the surface, it seems that Wikipedia does not worry too much about this as they already except payments through moneybookers.com (Skrill). In other words, this argument is a smoke screen. As a community, we should incur the cost of this study (i.e., testing), not Wikipedia. And this study should be unbiased and published appropriately.

Item 3: Being switzerland is just good policy... You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink it. And you may never really know the real reason why. It may be that buying Linden dollars on Second Life with real money makes some people's stomachs churn.

It may be more valuable to target lower hanging fruit and use the resources on conducting studies to prove our point.

As for Wikipedia, I proposed a different approach here... which is basically to use the fundamentals of Wikipedia (i.e., to document history) against itself approach. We can not put Wikipedia in the history of bitcoin right now, but we can put them in as the quintessential charity that does not accept bitcoin.

Thoughts?

jadair10

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