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Phew! Wikipedia Hits $6 Million in Needed Donations
Wikipedia announced today that they have hit the $6 million needed to keep the service going in fiscal 2009 (ends in July). This is certainly great news for all of the Web 2.0 celebs who have pages on the service! Apparently most of the funding will go to infrastructure for, what they say is, the 4th largest property on the Internet.
Founder Jimmy Wales has created a special thank you note on the Wikimedia Foundation website. He notes, "Since July 1, more than 125,000 of you have donated $4 million. In addition, we’ve received major gifts and foundation support totaling $2 million. This combined revenue will cover our operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009." Of course he is willing to accept any additional donations you wish to offer and would place them into a "reserve fund".
Svetlana wonders if $6 million will be enough as the amount needed to keep the site running rises each year. She notes, "But this $6 million budget will not be enough as soon as next year probably as the money Wikipedia consumes is rapidly growing from $3.5 million in 2007 which is almost twice the budget of 2006 as well."
I don’t use Wikipedia much but know many who do so it’s good to see the service continue through 2009.
What costs $6 million a year to keep Wikipedia running? This boggles my mind. What are the exec salaries, bandwidth expenses, etc.?
Ok, a couple clicks answered some of this..
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Questions/en#How_is_the_revenue_spent.3F
Still, $1.6M for finance and administration. Wow.
It would seem like most goes to hosting and bandwidth – the rest I assume goes to staffing to keep the spammers out. I still think the top tech companies could put money in for the hosting and be done with it.
I do think that companies like Yahoo and Microsoft or Google are sponsoring the operation already. I read that a while ago, so I am not sure what it is that they need. I know that the org also employs a bunch of people and so itself they sponsor/contribute to the development of Mediawiki (which is the software that runs Wikipedia and related).
Thanks for the good post, Allen. If you want to find out more about the different options available to Wikimedia, there’s always quite a good post at good ol’ Wikilog