Wikipedia editors vote 232 to 94 to request the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting crypto donations; the foundation is not legally bound by the proposal
The vote is another instance of Wikimedia’s editor community asserting influence over Foundation decisions without holding formal control. In 2016, editor pressure over a trustee culminated in Arnnon Geshuri’s resignation, establishing a relevant precedent for community-led accountability.
The immediate request was nonbinding, but subsequent coverage records the Foundation ending cryptocurrency donations after community feedback. That outcome makes the vote a meaningful signal about how Wikimedia’s governance responds to contributor concerns.
First-order effects
The Wikimedia Foundation faces a clear mandate from participating editors to reconsider crypto donations, while crypto donors face the prospect that their payment option will be removed.
Editors gain evidence that an organized vote can shape Foundation policy even where the Foundation has no legal obligation to comply.
Second-order effects
The Foundation’s fundraising operation must shift crypto contributors toward its remaining donation channels if it follows the request.
Future community campaigns can point to the earlier trustee-removal vote and this donation dispute as leverage when pressing the Foundation on contested policies.
Third-order effects
Wikimedia’s hybrid governance model increasingly depends on reputational accountability: formal Foundation authority is tempered by editor votes that can become difficult to ignore.
If this pattern persists, policy disputes over funding and institutional conduct will be settled less by legal voting rights than by whether the Foundation can sustain contributor legitimacy.
The trend: Wikimedia is moving toward a governance norm in which community mobilization constrains Foundation decisions despite the Foundation’s formal independence.
what's that rumbling noise in the distance, slowly growing louder, you ask? it is the stampede of crypto zealots who have never once donated to the wikimedia foundation, shouting “guess i'll take my money elsewhere!”
Narrator: And that was how Wikipedia was assigned to the dustbin of internet history, sitting in a pile of AskJeeveses and Myspaces https://twitter.com/...
“if the wikimedia foundation stops accepting crypto, we should fork wikipedia and make our own token-based version” the fact that you haven't heard of @everipedia yet says all you need to know about that idea. but maybe also see https://www.theverge.com/...
if anyone reading my tweets tonight is feeling grateful for wikipedia, the one thing we need most is more editors! the new editor sign-up tutorial is pretty decent these days, but if you run in to trouble i'm always happy to help a new editor. https://en.wikipedia.org/...
This is how crypto gets destroyed. Not in one big event, but by small groups of civically minded people pushing their institutions away from this nonsense until the whole thing collapses. https://twitter.com/...
The irony of a website dedicated to open-source knowledge forbidding its donors from supporting it with open-source money because of pressure from misinformation campaigns by corporations and governments is too painful. Very sad to see, @jimmy_wales https://twitter.com/...
Excellent. A request for the Wikimedia foundation to stop accepting cryptocurrency. If they do that, I'm committing right here to up my donations to them. https://twitter.com/...
✨yay we reduced the accessibility of funding and increased the fragility and vulnerability of a non-profit focused on spreading knowledge! ✨ https://twitter.com/...
meanwhile, what these wikimedia RFC authors are doing is advocating to *reduce* the funding window for wikimedia foundation. making participation in wikimedia harder for those who don't have access to the traditional payment system.
The discussion closed a little over an hour ago, so there has (reasonably) been no response from the Wikimedia Foundation yet. They did say while the RfC was ongoing that they were following the discussion.
The discussion, which I started in January, has run for three months. 400 users participated in total, though some were single-purpose accounts created just for the discussion (mostly to try to sway the RfC against making this request).