Wikipedia users in the UK will have noticed the appearance of fundraising banners across the site. This is because the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects, has just launched our tenth-annual year-end fundraising campaign.
The online fundraising campaign aims to raise $20 million globally, while the remainder of the Wikimedia Foundation’s funding will come from individual gifts given outside the year-end campaign, and from foundation grants. The overwhelming majority of the Wikimedia Foundation’s funding comes from individual readers giving an average of £10.
Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said: “People donate to Wikipedia because they find it useful, and they trust it because even though it’s not perfect, they know it’s written for them. We aim to tell the truth, and we can do that because of the millions of people who donate what they can each year, The average donor is paying for his or her own use of Wikipedia, plus the costs of hundreds of other people. The support of so many people keeps us independent and able to deliver the world’s knowledge for free. Exactly as it should be.”
The annual online fundraiser brings in the resources needed to keep the Wikimedia projects freely available to everyone around the world in their own language, and guarantees that Wikipedia will never have to rely on advertising. Donations help the Wikimedia Foundation maintain server infrastructure, improve and simplify the software that runs our projects, support initiatives around the globe to increase the number of project contributors, and make Wikipedia accessible to billions of people who are just beginning to access the internet.
Your donations also help to support the local chapters of the Wikimedia movement, such as Wikimedia UK, on the ground. This allows the chapters to train new editors, to support the improvement of content, to support cultural institutions in making their resources freely available and promote the use of Wikipedia in formal education settings.
The entire Wikimedia movement is very grateful to all donors for their support and the volunteers who help make the campaign a widely localised and internationalised endeavour. The 2013 year-end fundraising campaign builds on the success of previous years and will run through the end of this year. To make a donation, click the banners at the top of Wikipedia, or go directly to donate.wikimedia.org