Wow, we’ve never done this before. This is completely new to us.
ProleWiki relies on volunteer labour and efforts to function. Even the administration team (me and Forte) are volunteers on ProleWiki. None of us, from the editors to the techies, expect to be paid for our work on ProleWiki. We’re very happy to be involved in this project pro bono.
However, our providers do not work on a volunteer basis and we have to pay expenses to make ProleWiki.
Our donations and expenses are transparently reported here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate (end of the page), and as you can see we pay 132 USD every year to host ProleWiki on a VPS.
This VPS gives us 40 gigs of space, and we are starting to need more. We are looking at going up to 80 gigs of space, which should last us a while, but this would double our hosting costs to 264 USD per year. This space would make sure we can keep hosting texts, pages and pictures as well as possibly host even more stuff, like our own matrix server (the idea’s been passed around). It might also be spent on acquiring obscure texts so that we can add them to our library. We don’t really know yet as for now we’ve always operated at a loss and just covered our hosting expenses.
We’ve never asked for money before, but we are starting to have big plans with ProleWiki and definitely the extra space is something we are going to need sometime this year.
Thus, we are now asking for donations. Rest assured your donations will be used to cover our hosting expenses and any excess above 2 years’ time (528 USD) will be voted on by the editorship about what to do with it, if anything.
On this page: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate, you can find various ways of making a donation. If you have any question, please ask in the comments below.
Can I donate through Alipay or WeChat?
Not yet but that’s definitely something that we’ll try to set up! In the meantime if you have a credit card Stripe accepts Yuan
10 Euro donation thank you very much!!
If you can set up patreon, I think there is also no harm in setting up liberapay.com for the website. They are like patreon but don’t have as much features BUT are much more ethical.
We had a liberapay but somehow it doesn’t appear anymore, I don’t remember exactly why though. I’ll ask forte, he’ll know lol
2nded on liberapay. it’s like patreon but open source and with no fees. Then I can set up a recurring donation.
The problem we ran into was that our stripe account is located in brasil and liberapay didn’t work with that. We might have to validate a second stripe account somewhere else for that.
Otherwise we accept crypto, as unwieldy as that is lol
Huge 200$ donation from one of our editors! We have reached our first milestone with this, which was to cover 1 year of the new hosting plan! Next milestone: 2 years of this plan, so that we have a safety cushion!
Totally unrelated: is coding experience needed to extend prolewiki in a foreign language?
Nope, none at all except some mediawiki familiarity (although we can help with that too) just in case you need to make templates and other stuff.
If you are able to help open a new language for ProleWiki, the administration (in this case me) will support you in opening it, you’d just need to translate some interface messages and some documents (such as our principles), etc. Honestly, even if you do not have the technical experience, the effort to translate stuff is a bit of work, but if you’re into that, please, contact us in any way and we can arrange opening it in your language
We fixed Liberapay! https://en.liberapay.com/ProleWiki
You should now be able to donate using Liberapay, which keeps your info anonymous (or as anonymous as it can be, it still goes through stripe)
New patron at 5$ a month, thank you!
Damn, I really wish I could fork over some donations to you folks, but I don’t have a way to pay for things internationally. :(
Hmm, is there a method we could enact that would work for you?
But honestly don’t worry too much about it, the response has been amazing so far and we are not only able to secure our new hosting plan for one year, we are one our way to be making 50$ a month on patreon – enough to cover the next 2 years (provided we keep that amount for a year)
As soon as I figure out how to end my reoccurring wiki donation I had set up back when I was more of a lib I will change over. lol.
lol contrary to us, wikipedia makes a shitton of money from the government and other ventures, they don’t even need your cash donation.
I found this: https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cancel_or_change_recurring_giving and wow, they make it really difficult.
Oh yeah, it’s bullshit. I have been meaning to cancel this just gives me a reason to force myself to get it done. Lol
When businesses ask you to email them to cancel your subscription, they’re definitely preying on laziness to keep them going. Wikipedia doesn’t need all the donations they ask you for either, they make more than enough money.
New patreon at 10$ per month thank you so much!!