14 DAY TRIAL // The famous Internet encyclopedia announced on Friday that it managed to reach its $6 million fund raising target for this fiscal year, with contributions from more than 125,000 people, who donated some $4 million, an average of $32 each. The rest of the money, approximately $2 million, came from various projects the Wikimedia Foundation was or is involved in. Co-founder Jimmy Wales started the campaign on July 1st, in an attempt to gather sufficient money to pay for servers, bandwidth, hosting, and staff.
“Any donations beyond our $6 million goal are put in a reserve fund, which will help us to offset operating costs beyond the current fiscal year. Your continued support will also serve as a much-needed financial safety net if economic conditions continue to worsen globally. You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising,” Wales says in an official communicate on the site.
“You've helped make and keep Wikipedia available for the whole world. I deeply appreciate your support,” he concludes.
Other than paying for day-to-day operations, the money will also be used for sponsoring such projects as Wikipedia Academies (gatherings were people learn how to edit and submit content online), the development and improvement of open-source software that powers the site and the Wikimedia foundation, and for volunteer support.
Thus far, some 150,000 volunteers contributed to Wikipedia's extensive database, featuring more than 11 million articles, in 265 languages. Though a large portion of the articles in languages other than English are just translations of their English originals, there are some that only belong to specific languages.
"More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information, free of charge and free of advertising," Wales adds. This project is widely-applauded by online communities worldwide, although there are some critics who say that the content featured on the site is not always 100 percent accurate of verifiable.
However, in the last years, the degree of reliability that Wikipedia provides has increased, as more measures were set in place to ensure that all content can be verified by outside sources or by academic peers.