Wikimedia launches fund to raise $100mln over next 10 years

PanARMENIAN.Net - As Wikipedia turns 15, its operator The Wikimedia Foundation is hoping to secure its long-term future with a new endowment fund that aims to raise $100mln over the next 10 years, the Guardian reports.

The Wikimedia Endowment has been set up as a “permanent safekeeping fund” managed by the charity Tides Foundation, and could reduce Wikipedia’s reliance on annual donation drives to keep its service running.

The news came on the online encyclopedia’s 15th birthday as the Foundation announced that it now has more than 36m articles and 80,000 volunteers making 15k edits and creating 7k new articles an hour.

“Wikipedia seemed like an impossible idea at the time – an online encyclopedia that everyone can edit. However, it has surpassed everyone’s expectations over the past 15 years,” said co-founder Jimmy Wales.

The service has weathered questions about its funding, its neutrality and its accuracy over those first 15 years, with Wales and the Foundation regularly involved in wider debates about censorship, trolling and online identity.

One of the service’s biggest challenges for its next 15 years and beyond is how it evolves in a world where many people’s internet use is happening on mobile devices rather than computers – particularly in continents like Africa and Latin America.

“One of the things we’re focused on is the rise of the internet in the developing world, and mainly on mobile. That has its own set of challenges,” Wales said.

He added that Wikipedia is determined not to patronize people in these developing countries by assuming their online needs are completely different to those of people in the developed world.