Culture

Wikipedia founder makes personal appeal for support

by mtippett | December 29, 2008 at 04:16 pm

378 views | 38 Recommendations | 9 comments

If you use wikipedia as much as I do you no doubt have seen their fund raising efforts in action. Now the sites founder Jimmy Wales has penned a letter personally appealling to the huge number of people who use the site. I am a big fan of what Jimmy is doing and encourage everyone to give what they can.

An appeal from Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales Dear Reader,

Today I am going to ask you to support Wikipedia with a donation. This might sound unusual: Why does one of the world's five most popular web properties ask for financial support from its users?

Wikipedia is built differently from almost every other top 50 website. We have a small number of paid staff, just twenty-three. Wikipedia content is free to use by anyone for any purpose. Our annual expenses are less than six million dollars. Wikipedia is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded in 2003.

At its core, Wikipedia is driven by a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers - all dedicated to sharing knowledge freely. Over almost eight years, these volunteers have contributed more than 11 million articles in 265 languages. More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information, free of charge and free of advertising.

But Wikipedia is more than a website. We share a common cause: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's our commitment.

Your donation helps us in several ways. Most importantly, you will help us cover the increasing cost of managing global traffic to one of the most popular websites on the Internet. Funds also help us improve the software that runs Wikipedia -- making it easier to search, easier to read, and easier to write for. We are committed to growing the free knowledge movement world-wide, by recruiting new volunteers, and building strategic partnerships with institutions of culture and learning.

Wikipedia is different. It's the largest encyclopedia in history, written by volunteers. Like a national park or a school, we don't believe advertising should have a place in Wikipedia. We want to keep it free and strong, but we need the support of thousands of people like you.

I invite you to join us: Your donation will help keep Wikipedia free for the whole world.

Thank you,

Jimmy Wales

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dunkelberg

at 16:44 on December 29th, 2008

I wonder how many free online services will be able to survive based on donations or web advertising as the credit crisis continues to work its way into new nooks and crannies everyday.

mtippett

at 21:13 on December 29th, 2008

I think these guys are safe financially Dunkelberg. If they wanted to support themselves with advertising they could easily do it with the traffic they have. A $6 million annual burn is not much to cover with their reach even if ad rates plummet. The fear is that in doing so they would lose their independence.

Emilio Lizardo

at 16:49 on December 29th, 2008

Jimmy Wales is man way ahead of his time !

Paschen

at 20:49 on December 29th, 2008

Well, he is well worth supporting it is a great site and Idea as well.

bccmeteorites

at 21:26 on December 29th, 2008

Our experience with WIKIPEDIA has not been very good. We received an apology from a scientist who habitually changed our scholarly research in planetary science in order to advance an agenda of scientific misconduct and fraud for political reasons. WIKIPEDIA did not respond to our request to banish or chastise the scientist in question. In fact they didn't respond at all. The conduct by bullies renders the medium rather lame and fruitless in separating fact from fiction. For our money WIKILEAKS is a much better all around forum for truth, honesty and integrity.

http://www.wikileaks.org/

http://www.bccmeteorites.com/misconduct-planetary.html

caj1

at 22:08 on December 29th, 2008

I like Wikipedia.org and the idea of the related foundation. But who has enough money these days to donate to charities where you know no one, and will likely not ever meet someone who represents the organization? It is still too much of a vacuum for me to send money online.

duo

at 00:45 on December 30th, 2008

Wikipedia is my most reliable information source. It's an excellent site, and I hope they get the support needed to continue free services.

Geneva B

at 11:34 on December 30th, 2008

Wikipedia is great ad-free! Hopefully they can get enough support to stay that way. It's nice to think we can structure our media in such a way that it doesn't always have to cater to the demands of advertisers - this really narrows the margins of democratic expression.