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.
Despite all the drama that has been happening with Jimmy Wales, Rachel Marsden, and former board members of The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has attracted further donations. The latest substantial donation was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the amount is at $3 million.
This donation will be paid out at $1 million per year over the course of 3 years. One of the latest initiatives by The Wikimedia Foundation is to assign Flagged Revisions to Wikipedia content which essentially serves as how credible certain content is within the open source online encyclopedia.
The funding will also be used to support other initiatives for providing Wikipedia offline such as in the forms of DVDs or books.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation originates back to 1934 around the same time that Sloan was President and CEO of General Motors Corporation. In 1892, Sloan enrolled at M.I.T. , the institute that now bears his name as part of their Management program. About 31 years after graduating, Sloan took the President position at GM and retired in 1956. For the 10 years after that, Sloan devoted his time to philanthropic activities.
The Wikimedia Foundation was started in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a non-profit charitable orgnization based in San Francisco, Calif. The Wikimedia Foundation has 19 employees devoted to wiki-based projects. Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Information Sources:
[1] paidContent: Wikipedia Gets $3 Million Sloane Foundation Grant by David Kaplan
[2] MIT.edu Background – About MIT Sloan
[3] Wikipedia: Wikimedia Foundation
