Wikipedia to Receive $3 Million Donation
Wikipedia, the largest user-edited Internet encyclopedia is set to receive an enormous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The $3 million donation is the foundation’s largest donation to date.
The group will use their donations to fund the Wikimedia Foundation as it hires more staff and seeks to improve the quality and reach of Wikipedia content, according to foundation leaders.
"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," said Jimmy Wales, the project’s leader and a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. "And it should take away a lot of the questions people have had about whether we will need advertising to survive."
The award will come in $1 million installments over the next three years.
Since being founded in 2001, Wikipedia has earned its spot as the seventh most visited site in the U.S. according to comScore Inc.
Half of its $4.6 million budget covers the servers and Internet bandwidth to handle all that traffic. It also supports Wikipedias in dozens of other languages and affiliated free projects such as dictionaries and news sites.
The Wikimedia Foundation said it hopes to use the donation to invest in software that will increase their editing capabilities. They also anticipate bringing in new contributors and creating educational content for people without computers. Donations to Wikimedia increased from $1.3 million to $2.2 million last year. It does not have an endowment fund.
Wikipedia "represents a quantum leap" in the collection and organization of knowledge, said Doron Weber, a Sloan Foundation representative.
Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist who has given at least $300,000, recently introduced anonymous contributors to the foundation. Their contributions reached the $1 million mark, raising questions about investors’ possible intent to capitalize from Wikipedia’s brand name. Project leader Wales has denied those claims.
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