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Uncategorized Saturday, January 1st 2011 at 4:02 pm

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

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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.

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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  • Asdrsa5
  • Binary

    “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.”

    Hahaha. It’s true; every time I read an article, I could feel his sincere, puppy-dog eyes bearing down on me. I hope they can use some of that money to hire an English (et al.) teacher to read and fix the errors you see in a lot of the articles, because Wiki is a very useful source.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1544965097 Jackie Aldridge

    Yes, even though they guilted me into three donations, Wikipedia is sweet.

  • http://www.GregoryKohs.com Gregory Kohs

    I wonder when the news media will figure out that the Wikimedia Foundation spends on program services only 41 cents of every dollar they scam from donors, which earns them ONE STAR (out of four!) from Charity Navigator in organizational efficiency. The WMF’s own KPMG audit showed that it only costs about $2.5 million to keep the servers running, provide ample bandwidth, and even employ a few excellent code developers to keep the site software running efficiently. So, if it only costs $2.5 million, why the need to ask for $16 million from donors?

    I also wonder why the news media never thought to cover the 2009 story of how the Wikimedia Foundation needed extra office space, and as if by magic, they hand-picked Jimmy Wales’ for-profit corporation to be their landlord, THEN obtained competitive bids, THEN asked Wales’ for-profit company to match the average of the competitive bids.

    I too wonder why the media don’t seem to care that the 2010 market research study of past Wikimedia Foundation donors was awarded to the former employer of the WMF staffer running the project, without any competitive bidding whatsoever. And when the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation was asked how much the project cost, the guy asking the question was banned from the online discussion.

  • http://digitalblogindia.in/ Kunal

    i was searching for what he meant by technology worker from mumbai..anybody knows ?