Archive:Press releases/Wikipedia fundraiser surpasses $6million USD January 2009

Wikipedia fundraising campaign surpasses $6 million USD goal

Over 125,000 donors worldwide show their support for the non-profit encyclopedia

San Francisco, CA January 2, 2009: With the support of over 125,000 donors from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation has achieved its goal of raising over $6 million USD to sustain Wikipedia. As of today, the campaign has generated just over $6.2 million USD.

This year's campaign has been the most ambitious and successful in the Wikimedia Foundation's history. The funds will be used to maintain and grow the Foundation's technical infrastructure, which includes managing global traffic for Wikipedia, the 4th most popular web property on the internet.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote in a thank you letter posted on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation's website: "This campaign has proven that Wikipedia matters to its users, and that our users strongly support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising. We deeply appreciate the generosity of our supporters."

A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales, published on the Wikimedia Foundation's website on December 23, 2008, resulted in a surge of more than 50,000 contributions in eight days, totaling $2 million and closing the gap towards the revenue goal.

The Thank You letter from Jimmy Wales can be found on Wikimedia's website at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/ThankYou/en

Donors can continue to join other supporters by clicking on the support notices on Wikipedia, or by visiting http://donate.wikimedia.org.

About us

About the Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit, charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of its wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites. For a full list of projects, visit Our projects. All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by volunteers using the MediaWiki software. Their content may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.

About Wikipedia The goal of Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in history, is to create free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Anyone with Internet access is free to contribute by writing new articles and editing existing articles. Wikipedia was ranked the fourth most visited website on the internet in November 2008 according to comScore. Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers over eleven million articles in over 260 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than 2.6 million articles; followed by the German and French editions, each of which contain more than six hundred thousand articles. Nine other language editions contain 200,000+ articles, and more than 150 other languages contain 1,000+ articles. Wikipedia is entirely created and maintained by a community of active volunteers.

Press inquiries

Head of Communications Jay Walsh WikimediaFoundation.org blog.wikimedia.org +1 (415) 839 6885 x 609 jwalshwikimedia.org

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