14 DAY TRIAL // Wikipedia is in the midst of its sixth annual fund raiser to keep the site going. Run by the Wikimedia foundation, a non-profit organization, and with no revenue source of any kind, Wikipedia relies solely on donations to finance its operations and pay its 35 employees. The 2009 fund raiser has been running for more than a month now and a recent plea from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has managed to shatter all previous record for the amount donated in a single day.
“I started Wikipedia in 2001, and over the past eight years, I've been amazed and humbled to see hundreds of thousands of volunteers join with me to build the largest encyclopedia in human history,” Wales' appeal reads. “Wikipedia isn't a commercial website. It's a community creation, entirely written and funded by people like you. More than 340 million people use Wikipedia every month - almost a third of the Internet-connected world. You are part of our community.”
The message has resonated with Wikipedia's users as it has managed to draw in $430,000 from about 13,000 people in the first day and another $345,000 in the second, meaning that the organization is well on track to raise the kind of sums it’s looking for, though it's still only about half way towards the goal of $7.5 million.
It was actually quite surprising for the foundation and it was a huge jump over the previous days. "Jimmy's letter connected with the feeling of so many that Wikipedia has become an important part of their lives," Wikimedia's Jay Walsh explained the phenomenon. "Even people who never knew Wikipedia is a nonprofit project—once they found out, they wanted to support it."
The foundation plans to spend the money of the day-to-day operations, but also to fund long-term plans to help the site survive and grow. It has done this for the past six years and so far the plan seems to be working. Last year, it raised $6.9 million, above the $6 million target, so this time it set its sights on an even higher target.
