bg3wiki:Payment

DRAFT

In August 2024, bg3.wiki decided to begin serving ads. Part of the justification was that all significant contributors up to that point would be offered a share.

To apply for your share, please follow the below steps. Further, this page explains the Terms of Agreement; please read carefully until the end.

Payment Application Email

First, make sure there is an email address configured in your bg3.wiki user preferences: Special:Preferences

Then, from that same email address, send an email as follows.

To: bg3.community.wiki+payment@gmail.com

Subject: Payment Application: [USERNAME]

Contents:

1. Username: [USERNAME]

2. Legal name: [LEGAL NAME]

3. Payment method: ["SEPA" or "PayPal"]

4. IBAN for SEPA, or PayPal account: [IBAN or PAYPAL ACCOUNT]

I've read and agree to the Terms of Agreement as explained here: https://bg3.wiki/wiki/bg3wiki:Payment

Please copy/paste the email address, subject line, and contents exactly as above, for ease of automated processing.

Some details about the required fields are explained in the following.

Username

The username in the subject line and main contents of the email must be the bg3.wiki username that you used for the edits which you're requesting payment for.

If you've edited the wiki with multiple accounts, please only apply once for payment and notify me of the second account via a separate email or a message on Discord.

The email address from which you're sending the application must be registered as the email address for that account. See: Special:Preferences

Legal name

A legal name is unfortunately required, since I'm obligated by German trade and tax law to be able to prove where I'm making payments.

Payment method

Please choose SEPA if possible!

SEPA

If you reside in a country that supports SEPA, please choose this method, because the costs are extremely low and I will cover them.

In this case, you must provide the IBAN of the bank account to which you would like to receive the payment.

PayPal

PayPal takes a fee equivalent to 2% of the money sent.

This sounds like a small amount, but adds up to large numbers if you consider the total amount of money being transferred. For example, if the amount of PayPal transfers I make for one month, to various people, were to total 10,000 EUR, I would be paying 200 EUR in fees for that month. That would be 2,400 EUR paid by me in one year.

For this reason, recipients choosing PayPal will only receive 99% of the amount they would have otherwise received.

(This is approximately equivalent to splitting the fee 50/50 between us. The exact details: You receive 1% less, I pay 0.98% more, and PayPal receives 0.02% less due to the lower transfer amount.)

Please note that receiving money via PayPal reveals the name of the recipient to the sender.

Example Email

Here's a filled-out example email for Jane Doe, a fictitious editor.

From: jane.doe@example.org
To: bg3.community.wiki+payment@gmail.com
Subject: Payment Application: Jane93

1. Username: Jane93

2. Legal name: Jane Doe

3. Payment method: SEPA

4. IBAN for SEPA, or PayPal account: DE08500211202366464222

I've read and agree to the Terms of Agreement as explained here: https://bg3.wiki/wiki/bg3wiki:Payment

Terms of Agreement

By sending the Payment Application Email as instructed above, you agree to the following terms.

This is an agreement between you and the owner of the website bg3.wiki: The German LLC "WikiWiz UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" hereby referred to as WikiWiz.

Re-licensing of past contributions

You agree to the re-licensing of all your past contributions to bg3.wiki under the dual-licensing model CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 + CC BY-SA 4.0.

This means the existing CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license that already applies to your contributions remains in effect. But in addition, your contributions also become available to the public under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Please see bg3wiki:Copyrights for the details of how this arrangement works with regard to copyrighted material composed by multiple editors.

Payment amount

WikiWiz will pay you an amount of money depending on the monthly ad revenue of the website bg3.wiki and the significance of your contributions to bg3.wiki.

Depending on the significance of your contributions as judged by WikiWiz, you will be allocated to one of several brackets. Members of each bracket are entitled to a certain portion of bg3.wiki's monthly ad revenue up to and including November 2026.

Each month, a flat sum of 6,000 EUR will be deducted from the bg3.wiki ad revenue, to be put aside for business expenses. The portion of earnings you are entitled to, based on which bracket you fall into, will be a percentage of the remainder after this deduction.

The exact percentage share will be notified to you per email as a response to the Payment Application Email. Should you be unhappy with your share, see Cancellation.

Payment conditions

You will receive periodic payments for your monthly shares accumulated over 6-month periods. Invoices will be created on your behalf every December and June.

The first invoice will be created in December 2024, representing the sum of your shares up to and including November 2024. Each subsequent invoice will represent the subsequent 6-month period. For example, the June 2025 invoice will represent the sum of your shares from December 2024 up to and including May 2025. The last invoice will be created in December 2026 and represent the remainder of your shares ending with November 2026.

The payment for each corresponding invoice will be made no later than 60 days after the creation of the invoice.

Cancellation

You have a right to cancel this Agreement before receiving your first payment, but not after that.

The cancellation must be sent in writing via email, and sent from the same email address as the Payment Application Email.

Non-legally-binding notes

The following are clarifications to the above agreement in lay terms and are not legally binding.

I'll try to pay the invoices faster than 60 days. That's just the legally binding deadline I'm setting for myself.

Regarding the 6,000 EUR set aside each month: This consists mainly of my salary (also a "business expense" from a legal perspective) since this is my job now.

The original plan was to distribute up to 60% of the total earnings, but that would get me into financial trouble if the earnings ever drop to a low point such that the remaining 40% aren't enough. As such, there's going to be a flat deduction from the earnings to ensure a baseline of personal income for myself plus the ability to cover actual business expenses of the company.

From what remains after that deduction, a portion (not all) will be distributed to the contributors. I'm thinking about 75%, because based on the current monthly revenue that comes out to about the same thing as the "60% of total" that was originally planned. The remaining 25% of those profits will stay in the company for future use, like if I want to expand operations to other venues due to a shrinkage of the BG3 player-base.