on Apr 7th, 2008
Wikipedia Receives Donation
Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopedia, has received a $3m donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to be paid in equal chunks over three years. Which is nice. Even nicer, the money hails from a charity, and not from philanthropic venture capitalists, who may or may not have commercial designs upon Wikipedia’s ads-unsullied pages.
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.
Wikipedia is the world’s eighth biggest website, but it has a measly 15 full-time employees, up from last year’s even more measly 10. It will use the Sloan cash to fund quality improvements and to up staff levels to 25 people.
As Sue Gardner, executive director of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, notes, Wikipedia has been “operating on a shoestring: unable to pursue partnerships, execute projects, or even to effectively fund raise. 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.”
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