14 DAY TRIAL // Wikipedia has announced that it has ended its yearly fundraising campaign and that, yet again, it has managed to blow past last year's results. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and a number of associated sites, has raised more than $20 million at the end of 2011 in the campaign that runs for a little over a month each year.
Like a year before, the campaign started out with a banner featuring Wikipedia's cofounder Jimmy Wales. He urged readers to help out the site to ensure that it lives for another year and provides them with the free and ad-free service they've come to expect.
Wikipedia contributors as well as other people working on the project, such as lead engineers, have been featured in the banner ads all telling their story and underlining why the site is so important.
More people than ever contributed this year, more than one million people gave something back to Wikipedia, from nearly every country in the world the foundation said.
"The number of Wikimedia Foundation donors has increased ten-fold since 2008 and the total dollar amount raised in the campaign has risen to over $20 million from $4.5 million [€3.47 million]," Wikimedia revealed.
"Funds raised in this campaign will be used to buy and install servers and other hardware, to develop new site functionality, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects, and support the large global community of Wikimedia volunteers," it explained.
The site plans to spend about $28.3 million, €21.9 million this year, most of which will come from the year-end campaign. The rest will come from bigger grants and donations from various institutions, but also small donations from contributors that trickle in throughout the year.
There's no way to understate the importance of Wikipedia. It hosts 20 million articles in 282 languages. While they may not all be of the greatest quality of interest, the site is a reliable source of information on virtually any subject out there and it has become so indispensable that most of us can't really imagine a world without it.