Do you know?
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on an openly editable model. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
The founder, Jimmy Wales, decided that there would be no advertising and therefore no distractions and no perception of influence by advertisers.
Google and Yahoo have thousands of servers and staff. Wiki has about 800 servers and 150 staff.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views.
Anyone can contribute or edit Wikipedia.
How often do you use Wikipedia?
Have you ever contributed or edited Wikipedia?
Oddly whilst I was drafting this a while ago Mark wrote two interesting blog posts on the subject of Wikipedia: In Wikipedia we trust and The Apocryphal Cow .
Anyone using Wikipedia at the moment will see a banner:
Dear Wikipedia readers: We are non-profit, but also the #5 website in the world. With 450 million monthly users, we have costs like any top site: servers, power, rent, programs, staff and legal help. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations averaging about $30. If everyone reading this gave $5, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. If Wikipedia is useful to you, please help keep it online another year. Thank you, from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Last
year when the banner appeared it occurred to me that I use Wikipedia a
lot and I often use quotes and occasionally pictures from it too. So I
decided that instead of seeing advertisements come to Wiki I would pay
for the use I had made of it.
This year I did the same: The response was quite enlightening:
This year I did the same: The response was quite enlightening:
Thank you for donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
It's easy to ignore our fundraising banners, and I'm really glad you didn't. This is how Wikipedia pays its bills --- people like you giving us money, so we can keep the site freely available for everyone around the world.So this week I'm thankful for Wikipedia.
People tell me they donate to Wikipedia because they find it useful, and they trust it because even though it's not perfect, they know it's written for them. Wikipedia isn’t meant to advance somebody's PR agenda or push a particular ideology, or to persuade you to believe something that's not true. We aim to tell the truth, and we can do that because of you. The fact that you fund the site keeps us independent and able to deliver what you need and want from Wikipedia. Exactly as it should be.
You should know: your donation isn’t just covering your own costs. The average donor is paying for his or her own use of Wikipedia, plus the costs of hundreds of other people. Your donation keeps Wikipedia available for an ambitious kid in Bangalore who’s teaching herself computer programming. A middle-aged homemaker in Vienna who’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. A novelist researching 1850s Britain. A 10-year-old in San Salvador who’s just discovered Carl Sagan.
On behalf of those people, and the half-billion other readers of Wikipedia and its sister sites and projects, I thank you for joining us in our effort to make the sum of all human knowledge available for everyone. Your donation makes the world a better place. Thank you.
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