Wikipedia's Pledge Drive Ends -- So Do Those Jarring Testimonials!

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:35:22 +0000

The Wikimedia Foundation’s annual fundraising campaign concluded today after the nonprofit raised $20 million from one million donors worldwide.

The end of the pledge drive also means the end of those fundraising banners on every page that highlighted editors who contributed to the site.

Against the site’s normal black-and-white page design and absence of ads, the contributors’ color photos popped from the page and certainly fulfilled the goal of pulling readers up to the plea.

And while their absence won’t exactly be mourned by readers, it will deprive us of some entertaining juxtapositions, such as the one at right, with the visage of an earnest volunteer looking like an illustration accompanying the Wikipedia entry for a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring Justin Timberlake called “Dick in a Box.”

Wikimedia said it will use the funds to buy hardware, develop new features on the site, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects and support volunteers.

The site now employs 97 people and plans to spend $28.3 million this year on expenses.

The remainder of funds will trickle in throughout the year in the form of grants and other donations, such as ones from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki’s Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which gave $500,000 as part of the campaign in November.

In a letter thanking donors, Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote: “We’re the #5 most-popular site in the world — we operate on a tiny fraction of the resources of any other top site. We will use your money carefully and well, I promise you.”

Happy 10th Birthday, Wikipedia! What's Next? (Video)

Liz Gannes — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:04:34 +0000

Wikipedia now seems like an enduring institution on the Web, but the site was only founded 10 years ago, tomorrow.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

[ See post to watch video ]

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

AllThingsD » Sue Gardner

Wikipedia's Pledge Drive Ends -- So Do Those Jarring Testimonials!

Happy 10th Birthday, Wikipedia! What's Next? (Video)