As Wikipedia’s celebrates its 10 years of existence, they have hit 3.5 million English articles in over 250 languages. Thousands of people are contributing the Wikipedia’s articles, but less than 15% of that number are women. A majority of the contributors are in their mid-20s.

Open source encyclopedia Wikipedia is now celebrating 10 years of existence. Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001 and became the fifth most popular website with 410 million monthly visitors (comScore). Within three years of starting, Wikipedia hit 500,000 articles in 50 languages. Now there are 17 million articles over 270 languages. There are several events celebrating the 10 year anniversary happening across the world. You can read about them here: http://ten.wikipedia.org/

The parent company of open source encyclopedia Wikipedia has raised $16 million just in time in 2010. This is more than double the $7.5 million that Wikipedia raised in 2009. Over half a million people donated to the Wikimedia Foundation this year. Supposedly putting Jimmy Wales’ face on the donation banner cover helped increase donations. “Wikipedia is the only major, top-ten site in the world that is ad-free and funded primarily by its readers and users,” stated Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner. [ReadWriteWeb]

People sometimes react positively when the face of the founder of a company is prominently displayed on their website. In this case, it worked well for Wikipedia. In an effort to raise $16 million for keeping Wikipedia ad free, the company wanted to double the amount they asked for last year.

The Wikimedia Foundation has received a $2 million grant from Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG).  Google provided the investment through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation. “Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet,” stated Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”  The Wikimedia Foundation operates several websites including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource.

[WikiMedia press release]

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was on Bloomberg TV earlier this week to clarify that there has not been a mass exodus of voluntary editors.  Wikipedia is still very much driven by the community.

Wales also revealed some interesting numbers about Wikipedia.  To maintain Wikipedia, it costs around $10 million per year.  The website survives primarily off of donations.  So far Wikipedia has over $3 million in donations for the year.

Personally I’m impressed by how little it costs to maintain Wikipedia.  On a per day basis, it costs about $27,397.26 to keep Wikipedia running.

What about some of the other top websites?  As a comparison, YouTube costs about $2 million per day in just storage and bandwidth.  Facebook most likely costs close to $300,000 per day considering that they are hosting 10 billion photos.  In 2007 and early 2008, Facebook spent around $67 million on rackable servers.  Facebook most likely spends $500 million per year between servers, employee salaries, infrastructure, office space, and other miscellaneous costs.

Below is a video of the interview [via BusinessInsider]:

Omidyar Network, the investment arm of Pierre Omidyar’s wealth has made a $2 million grant.  Pierre is the founder of eBay and his personal wealth is roughly $3.6 billion.  The Omidyar Network was started in 2004 and there was about $270 million in assets given to the investment firm.

Some of the Internet companies that the Omidyar Network invested in include Digg, Federated Media Publishing, KaBOOM, Seesmic, Linden Lab, and Wikia.  Wikia is another company that was founded by the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Wikipedia receives about 300 million monthly unique visitors and is the 5th most visited website in the world.  However Wikipedia runs on donations and does not have any advertising.  At the end of last year, about 125,000 donors invested $6.2 million in helping keep Wikipedia alive.

Of that $6.2 million, $3 million was given by the Sloan Foundation and an anonymous friend gave $286,800. As part of the investment, Matt Halprin of Omidyar will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors.  Before working at Omidyar, Halprin was the VP of global trust and safety at eBay.

For those of you that do not like the current design of Wikipedia, there is some good news.  The Wikimedia team is working on a new design for the website and if you have an account on Wikipedia, you can check it out.  There is a new beta skin/theme that makes Wikipedia look a little bit more glossier and with less of a traditional look and feel.

Anyone that visits a Wikipedia page will notice a link that says “Try Beta” on the top right.  But having an account is required to enable the “Vector” skin.  Editing Wikipedia becomes a lot easier with the new beta skin too.  The English version of Wikipedia has 2.979 million articles in their database as of right now.

“Have you noticed the “Try Beta” link on the top of Wikimedia project sites?  The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar.   Well, they have been available from user preferences over a month now, but we wanted to reach out to anonymous users.  Please check it out and let us know your thought, if you haven’t tried already,” stated Wikimedia Usability Initiative employee Naoko Komura.

[via LifeHacker]