Wikipedia has always been a community-based website available for free for all the users on the web. However, due to maintenance costs and other expenses, users were invited to donate money to the Foundation in order to keep the service alive and provide more and more articles to the web.

However, the biggest donation ever didn't come from the Wikipedia users, although they have a pretty important role in Wikipedia's evolution. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation decided to give Wikipedia no less than $3 million, an important amount of money which is going to be used for hiring more staff and raise the quality bar of Wikipedia's content.

"We think it will pave the way towards more donations as it is a signal that a major foundation sees good in what we are doing. And it should take away a lot of the questions people have had about whether we will need advertising to survive," Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's project leader, told AP.

According to PC Pro, the $3 million donation will be divided in three parts of $1 million which will be transferred to Wikipedia in a period of three years.

"Wikipedia and its sister projects have an enormous global impact, but the organization behind them has been operating on a shoestring: unable to pursue partnerships, execute projects, or even to effectively fundraise," Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikipedia Foundation, told PC Pro.

"This institutional support from Sloan will enable us to make progress on some key goals: increasing quality, broadening participation, and distributing free knowledge to people without Internet connectivity."

Having a look at a pie chart published by Wikimedia Foundation, the owner of Wikipedia, related to the planned spending distribution of 2007-2008, shows us that the main concern of the encyclopedia is investing in technology (IT and operations) including bandwidth, hardware and salaries with no less than 57 percent of the total budget. On the second place we have Finance and Administration (15 percent), followed by the Office of the Executive Director (11 percent) and Program Services (4 percent).