Anonymous Friend Gives Wikipedia $286,800.00 Donation

By Amit Chowdhry ● Dec 28, 2006

Yesterday around 10:18 PM, an anonymous friend donated $286,800 to Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E., the arm of fund collection for Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ Wikipedia. As of right now, Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E. has raised over $709,000. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit open-source website, all donations are appreciated. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the #12 ranked website, so the server costs are obviously very high for Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia “receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.” Less than a quarter of Wikipedia’s traffic is accounted for by non-registered users who are not likely to be article contributors. In the 4th quarter of 2005, the cost to keep Wikipedia online was $321,000 with server costs accounting for roughly 60%.

About 5 days ago, I had found a post on StartupSquad about an upcoming search engine called Wikiasari was being developed by Jimmy Wales. StartupSquad and Pulse 2.0 wrote that Amazon was involved with the project development. A comment by Jimmy Wales himself on our post pointed out that this information was inaccurate. Then similar incorrect information was written on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Now that I know that Jimmy Wales reads our blog, I’d like to personally congratulate him on the large donation that was given to the Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E.