Wikimedia Foundation receives $2M from Google

Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other popular wiki collaboration sites get a boost

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit charitable organization responsible for multiple collaboration wiki projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary, will be formally announcing today the receipt of a $2 million donation from Google, first confirmed last night by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Besides its most immediately recognizable online databases, Wikimedia is responsible for a great deal of other fun and useful sites like Wikiquote, Wikisource, and many others.

"Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet. This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a statement.

The Wikimedia Foundation recently ran a large-scale campaign across Wikipedia and its other sites, calling to users to donate whatever they could, in an effort to keep sites like Wikipedia free for users, free from advertising, and free from influences that could jeopardize the sites' attempt to maintain neutrality.

At the end of the campaign, Wikimedia announced that it had exceeded its expectations by $500,000, having raised $8 million from over 230,000 donors across the world. That's nearly double the number of people that donated the year before.

Having personally donated $20 to the Foundation, I along with other donors received an email from Wikimedia which included the 2008-09 Annual Report for the time period of July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009, which included these interesting tidbits:

Today, I am very pleased to share with you our Annual Report for the time period of July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009. During that time:

* Wikipedia and its sister projects grew by 1.6 billion words and 1.8 million media files.
* We expanded our global readership to more than 300 million visitors per month.
* We launched initiatives to substantially improve Wikipedia's ease of use.
* We continued to invest in operations infrastructure and innovative technologies.
* We began developing new partnerships to increase Wikipedia's quality.

With Google's handsome donation, Wikipedia will assuredly continue to operate as it always has: ads-free.