Wikipedia has secured 16 million dollars in spontaneous donations from readers and supporters, in order to save the project, leaving it without internal advertising for 2011.
For weeks – precisely since November – anyone who landed on any page of Wikipedia has surely noticed the photo of Jimmy Wales, its founder, accompanying an appeal. The stakes were the request for donations to subsidize Wikipedia, allowing the online encyclopedia to continue to remain free. The goal was known and clear: not to resort to advertising because, as Wales himself explains, “Advertising and business are not the devil, but they are concepts that do not belong to us. We are like a library or a public park.”
The appeal was favorably received by 500,000 people who, with many small or large donations over 50 days, donated a total of 16 million dollars to Wikipedia. It is estimated that each user donated an average of 22 dollars.
The Wikipedia fundraising is not new: it is indeed a form of financing to which the Wikipedia staff resorts every year. What happened this time, however, had never happened before: the figure planned in the rosiest forecasts was reached in a short time (less than two months) thanks to a much larger participation than in the past. Suffice it to say that in 2009 the subscribers were 230,000, compared to 500,000 today.
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