Wikimedia Foundation Stops Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations

The Wikimedia Foundation, which administers Wikipedia and is based in San Francisco, California, has pushed back against bitcoin and said that it will no longer accept cryptocurrency donations following a three-month debate following a request to do so. According to the survey, 70% of those who responded said they did not want any cryptocurrency donations.

According to a Wikimedia Foundation update, “the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to discontinue direct acceptance of Cryptocurrency as a means of donating.”

“We began our direct acceptance of cryptocurrency in 2014 based on requests from our volunteers and donor communities. We are making this decision based on recent feedback from those same communities,” Wikimedia Foundation decided to add.

The Wikimedia Foundation initially partnered with Coinbase to accept Bitcoin payments before switching to BitPay to accept donations in other cryptocurrencies. The institution also said it would “continue to monitor this issue, and appreciate the feedback and consideration given to this evolving matter by people across the Wikimedia movement”.

This implies that, nearly eight years after deciding to accept cryptocurrency donations, the organization will no longer accept Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Ethereum donations. The media reported that, after excluding new accounts and unregistered users, 232 to 94, or 71.17 percent, of the fewer than 400 individuals who voted, supported no longer taking bitcoin donations on environmental and other grounds.

According to a report published by Coin Desk, Wikimedia has left the door open to perhaps resuming crypto acceptance, saying it will continue to watch the situation.

Wikipedia is a multilingual open online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteers using a wiki-based editing system and open collaboration. Wikipedians are individual contributors, often known as editors.

Wikipedia is the world’s most popular and widely read reference work. Wikipedia is consistently one of Alexa’s top 15 most popular websites; as of 2022, it was the tenth most popular site. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the United States that is mostly funded through donations.

Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of information, as well as for its breadth of coverage, unique structure, culture, and lack of commercial bias, but it has also been chastised for demonstrating systemic bias, particularly towards women and claimed ideological bias. Its dependability was challenged regularly in the 2000s, but it has since improved, and it is now widely appreciated in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

It has gotten a lot of press for its coverage of sensitive themes including American politics and important events like the COVID-19 outbreak. Governments all throughout the world have censored it, from individual pages to the entire site. It has, however, become part of popular culture, with references in books, films, and scholarly research.

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