Wikipedia stays ad-free; turns 10 on Jan. 15
By Balasubramanyam Seshan | January 3, 2011 4:03 AM EST
The new year celebrations is over, but the ceremony is not over for
Wikipedia which is turning 10 on Jan. 15. Added to this Wikipedia has
raised $16 million, allowing the service to remain ad-free for another
year.
REUTERS
The new year celebrations is over, but the ceremony is not over for
Wikipedia which is turning 10 on Jan. 15. Added to this Wikipedia have
raised $16 million, allowing the service to remain ad-free for another
year.
The Wikimedia Foundation, parent of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, got
from 140 countries more than 500,000 donations, higher than 240,000
total contributions in 2009, with an average donation size of about
$22.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said the fundraiser was the
'shortest' in the online encyclopedia's history, lasting just 50 days.
Out of the $16 million donations, $13.7 million came via the Internet,
while the rest came from direct checks.
In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation raised just over $8 million from
more than 240,000 individual donations (up from 139,000 donations
during the 2008 campaign). The average donation in 2009 was $33, and
donations came in from over 100 countries.
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"This year is a little more incredible than most because this year we
celebrate Wikipedia's tenth anniversary. It's so important that we
kick the year off just like this: by fully funding the Wikimedia
Foundation's budget to support Wikipedia and all the sister projects
as we head into the next decade of our work together," said Wales.
Funds raised by the Wikimedia Foundation's annual campaign will
contribute to the 2010-11 operating budget. For the fiscal 2010–2011,
the Wikimedia Foundation has planned for $20.4 million of annual
expenses, over half of which will be spent on technology.
With the official close of the 2010 Fundraiser, Wikipedia will now
kick-off its 10-year birthday celebration, taking place on January 15,
2011. To support celebrations, the Foundation will be offering limited
edition Wikipedia t-shirts, customizable in over 200 languages. The
shirts will only be available until January 15 for a minimum donation
of $25, shipping included.
From the launch of a new outreach project in Kenya to a film screening
in Tel Aviv, there are currently 65 events of all kinds. Most events
are free to attend or very low cost. The complete list of anniversary
activities can be found at Wikipedia site.
Recently, Ukrainian Wikipedia reached 250,000 article milestone that
was officially created on Dec. 21 at 8:45 pm, Kyiv Time. Since it
started in 2004, Ukranian Wikipedia has grown at a steady rate, adding
50,000 articles in just the last nine months, making it the sixteenth
largest language Wikipedia.
In 2010, the Ukrainian encyclopedia experienced a 64 percent increase
in page views -- 860,000 people have viewed 30 million articles in
December alone. Although Wikipedia is available in over 270 languages,
only 35 language Wikipedias have reached the 100,000 article
milestone.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and also operates Wikipedia-related
projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.
According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects
operated by the Wikimedia Foundation received 410 million unique
visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property
world-wide (November 2010).
The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a portmanteau
from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the
Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'quick') and encyclopedia.
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online
English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by
experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on
March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis Inc., a web portal
company.
Bomis Inc.'s main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry
Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. On January
10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create
a wiki as a 'feeder' project for Nupedia. Wikipedia was formally
launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition,
and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
Wikipedia has become the largest and most popular general reference
work on the Internet, ranking eighth among all websites on Alexa and
having 365 million readers. There are currently 273 language versions
of Wikipedia.
Of these language versions, English-language edition has about 3.52
million articles with total of 22.75 million, while German language
has 1.17 million articles with total of 3.31 million and French has
1.05 million articles with total of 4.23 million.
Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and
distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to
every single person on the planet in their own language."
Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development
have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as
Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, Hudong, Baidu Baike, and WikiZnanie
likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more
traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2, and Everything2.
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