Wikimedia Foundation Exceeds Fundraising Goal

by Nathaniel Ed on January 3rd, 2009 at 8:08 pm EDT - 172 views

The Wikimedia Foundation, the foundation behind Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks (a favourite of mine!) and other online wiki sites has exceeded its fundraising goal for 2008. It pulled in 6.2 million, surpassing its 6 million dollar goal by $200,000, which was provided for by over 125,000 donors. An appeal from founder Jimmy Wales brought the organization 2 million dollars in eight days.

In a thank-you letter posted by Wales (taken directly from the letter via wikipedia.org), it is explained that:

“Your donation makes you a key supporter of the free culture movement, and pays for:

• Day-to-day operations: servers, hosting, bandwidth, our staff of just 23 people.
• Continued development & improvements of open source software that powers all Wikimedia projects.
• Outreach events like Wikipedia Academies: in-person workshops where you can learn more about how to use and edit Wikipedia.
• Volunteer support: helping our international volunteer community to grow and to continue to do amazing work.”

Wikipedia is a great source of information for free to the general public (although you shouldn’t use it in school papers), and it’s good to see that people are appreciating it. I hope Wikimedia continues its good work in the future.  The different websites they own are: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikicommons, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, MediaWiki, Wikimedia (Meta-Wiki), Wikimedia (Incubator), and Wikimania, all linked to from the main Wikimedia page.

Source: cnet news
Picture courtesy of news.cnet.