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Fund drives – Wikimedia Foundation

Posted By Eric Ptak On December 26, 2005 @ 8:17 pm In Education | No Comments

I always wondered how Wikipedia supported itself. Now I know: Fund drives [1]. It only makes sense that a free service like this would rely on donations to stay alive. I’m just flummoxed at the amount of money required to run everything: over a million dollars a year? But then again, they do have a lot of things going on:

  • Wikipedia Free encyclopedia
  • Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals
  • Wikiquote Collection of quotations
  • Wikisource Free source documents
  • Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus
  • Wikinews Free content news source
  • Commons Shared media repository
  • Wikispecies Directory of species

They also have a proposal for a Wikiversity, a free University. That would be interesting.

I’m sure the servers necessary for everything cost more than just a little. And then there’s running the foundation, doing all the coding. I wonder how many people work there? I wonder how I could get a job like that? I don’t know that I could do that, though. Taking care of my own little corner of the web, and my family’s website is more than enough for me to handle.


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[1] Fund drives: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives