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Wikimedia Reaches Its Fundraiser Goals; No More Giant Jimmy Wales Banners?

Wikimedia announced this morning that they have concluded their current and shortest fundraiser ever; and that despite its brevity they managed to have their most successful year ever, raising $16 million.  It’s not like it was close, either: in 2009 they only managed to fundraise $7.5 million.

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Said founder Jimmy Wales:

This fundraiser had all the ingredients of what we love about Wikimedia projects: people come together, contribute what they have, and together we do something amazing. The contribution of a technology worker in Mumbai, India joins with the contribution of a stock broker from London, and of a student in Moscow, and the result is that we’re able to sustain and support this joint endeavor for another year.

According to Wikimedia, the average donation was a respectable $22, and over $500,000 donations were made.  Graph junkies can check out their published real-time statistics for the fundraiser here (they only cover online donations, however, and not money from checks or other nont-digital sources).

To what does Wikimedia attribute their success?  Probably something about their thriving community and the great services they provide.  But we all know that they owe a lot to the well calibrated and nigh-on-jewish-aunt-level-of-guilt-inducing-stare of Jimmy Wales, which can hopefully be retired and recharged until the next time the world requires his awesome superpower.

(via ReadWriteWeb.)

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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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