The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, long controversial among scholars and teachers, is apparently not very controversial among users. The foundation which runs Wikipedia has announced that it has met its $6 million 2008-2009 fund raising goal.

The Wikimedia Foundation made the announcement on Friday, six months before the end of the current fiscal year’s fund raising campaign, having raised a total of $6.2 million. Late in December, site founder Jimmy Wales posted an appeal for money to fund the user-written reference site. In the eight days after that appeal was made, over 50,000 contributors sent in a total of more that $2 million. Amazingly, that brings the total number of contributors to over 125,000 for this year’s campaign.

The foundation says that the money will be used to improve the site in a number of ways, according to an Associate Press article. Part of the money will go to upgrading the servers on which the the wiki software runs and upon which data is stored. Part will go to improving the communications bandwidth available to the site. Both of these will make the site faster and more responsive to users. The funds will also be used to upgrade the software which forms that basis of the site’s operations.

Wikipedia famously operates without any advertising on the web site, which ranks in the top ten visited sites on the Web year after year. It relies totally upon donations from users and charitable foundations to stay alive. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has contributed $3 million dollars, one million per year for three years beginning this year. Just a month ago, the Stanton foundation contributed $890,000 to be used to improve the site’s article editing processes.

The Wikimedia Foundation hopes that contributions made by major organizations will help to bolster the online encyclopedia’s reputation for accuracy and institutional acceptance. Academics who often criticize the user-contributed articles would have lees room for that criticism if Wikipedia was funded by the same institutions that fund their academic studies.

To this same end, part of the money contributed this year will be used to fund trips to institutions around the world by Wikipedia staff and spokesmen. These trips will focus on bringing more academics and professionals into the Wikipedia fold as contributors. If these groups were involved in the ongoing process of building the online encyclopedia, they would be less likely to criticize it.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 3:39 pm under Internet, Open source.

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