Wikipedia raises $6m from user donations
- Added:
- Jan 05, 2009
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has met its $6m fundraising goal for fiscal 2008.
With about six months left in this year's campaign, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation has raised $6.2m. The foundation operates the site without advertising as a matter of principle, making donations critical.
A flood of donations came in after the site's founder, Jimmy Wales, posted an appeal for support in late December.
The foundation said about 50,000 users contributed a total of $2m in the space of eight days, bringing the total number of donors to more than 125,000.
The money will go toward improving the software Wikipedia runs on as well as upgrading the servers and Internet bandwidth that accommodate the site's traffic.
Wikipedia consistently ranks among the 10 most visited Web sites in the world.
Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia's fundraising prowess has expanded quickly. The foundation hauled in $1.3 million two years ago and $2.2 million last year.
In March 2008, the site received a $3 million gift from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to be dispensed in $1 million annual installments. Last month the Stanton Foundation gave $890,000 to make Wikipedia's editing process more user-friendly.