14 DAY TRIAL // Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world, yet, unlike pretty much every other website its size, it has no direct revenue. Operated by Wikimedia, a non-profit organization, all of the site’s funding comes from donations. Operating a top 10 site is not cheap, though, and Wikimedia has struggled each year to drum up more donations. Yet, the latest plans are to almost double its yearly budget and double its staff in the next year, all of this while increasing editorial contributions and the number of visitors.
The ambitious plan was unveiled at the yearly Wikimania conference. The sixth edition of the annual conference was held in Poland. Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director, laid down the plans to a rather surprised audience. Wikimedia has never been so ambitious. The site has grown organically year after year, but it never seemed like the foundation had very clearly drawn out plans for Wikipedia.
Wikimedia wants to add 44 more people to its staff, mostly to handle the expanding infrastructure and to promote the site. The foundation says it needs the new people to handle Wikipedia’s growth which it actually wants to accelerate. Already one of the top sites in the world, the plans are now to have 680 million monthly visitors by 2015. Currently, only Google and Facebook can boast this kind of numbers for a single site. But with Facebook aiming for one billion visitors, Wikipedia’s plans may not be that farfetched.
In order to support this growth, Wikimedia wants to raise significant additional funding, $20 million in the next year, up from about $10 million in 2009. Wikipedia managed to get about $8 million in donations from the site’s users in the last year. Early in 2010, Google donated an additional $2 million. The site also plans to build a new data center, its third, to ensure that it can keep up with demand and that issues, like the recent outage, are avoided.