Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation Transfers All Domain Names From GoDaddy To MarkMonitor

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:35:38 +0000

The Wikimedia Foundation domain name portfolio has been transferred from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor. The portfolio transfer was fully completed yesterday. The transfers were done with any interruption of service during the procedure.

Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world and the Wikimedia Foundation cares about who handles their domain names. The legal department at Wikimedia felt that GoDaddy was not best fit for their domain names. GoDaddy initially supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was a controversial anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Wikimedia said that they were very impressed with MarkMonitor. Wikimedia has been looking to switch from GoDaddy this past December. MarkMonitor is a U.S. based registrar with an office in San Francisco and is experienced with managing high-traffic domains.

Less Than 15% Of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:35:57 +0000

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner is aiming to increase the contribution from women to 25% by 2015. Not because of diversity, but because Gardner believes that Wikipedia’s content would be improved.

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” said Gardner. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.” Some of the disparities are quite noticeable. For example, the article on The Sopranos is chock-full of information but each article on Sex and the City has a brief summary of each episode.

Happy 10th Birthday Wikipedia

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:00:46 +0000

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/

Wikipedia Can Now Remain Ad-Free After Raising $16 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:25:23 +0000

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]

Banner With The Face Of Jimmy Wales Helped Increase Wikipedia Donations

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 04:04:56 +0000

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.

It turns out that Wikimedia was able to raise in a week what took a month last year. Wikimedia raised a little bit under $3 million in eight days. Last year it took 36 days to make that amount of money.

“I think more and more people everywhere are recognizing the impact Wikipedia has made on their lives– the rapid rise in donations this year is the response,” stated Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Moka Pantages. “It’s now the go-to place for anything you need to know. These donations are thousands of people all over the world expressing gratitude and supporting the efforts of the Wikipedians who work long and hard to keep this thing alive and growing.”

Another reason for Wikimedia’s growth is because they started using a banner that features the face of Jimmy Wales. In the infographic below, you will notice the amount of donations that were provided as a click-through from their different banners.

[ReadWriteWeb]

Wikimedia Foundation Receives $2 Million Grant From Google

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:45:55 +0000

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]

Bloomberg Interviews Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:58:57 +0000

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]:

Pierre Omidyar’s Investment Firm Gives Wikipedia $2 Million Grant

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:47:01 +0000

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.

New Wikipedia Design In Beta

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:29:31 +0000

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]

The Trials & Tribulations Of Jimmy Wales: Has Valleywag Gone Kenneth Starr On Us?

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:26:08 +0000

If I were to compare Jimmy Wales to a political figure, I would say that it would be Bill Clinton. According to Wikipedia, “Clinton presided over the longest period of peace-time economic expansion in American history, which included a balanced budget and a reported federal surplus.” And Wales presides over the largest open source encyclopedia, Wikipedia as the Chairman Emeritus of its parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation. When people needed leadership, they turned to Clinton and when people need information, they turn to Wikipedia.

The reasoning I also chose to compare Clinton to Wales is because of how much the media scrutinized both of their personal lives. Kenneth Starr, a lawyer that took on the Lewinsky scandal revealed personal information of Clinton’s in the Starr Report which eventually led to Clinton’s admittance of his sexual involvement with the White House intern. The Starr Report is justified because it found that the President broke the law, but the media had a field day with it.

ValleyWag, a gossip blog that recently acted as a modern day Starr Report, published personal IM conversations between Jimmy Wales and his former girlfriend, Rachel Marsden. Not cool, ValleyWag.

Publishing this sort content seems legal because of the First Amendment, but it is outright unethical. It is unethical because the conversations were used as a way to defame Wales’ character. Imagine the millions of personal conversations taking place on AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger. What if these companies started going out of their way to publish conversations taking place on their chat software?

To make matters worse, Wales’ expenditures and actions with Wikipedia got dragged into the media mayhem. Dan Wool, a former Wikimedia board member published an article about how Wales sought reimbursements from the Wikimedia Foundation for various swanky personal expenses. This was denied by current board members in an article released by the Associated Press. Mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Wales left a response to some of the accusations on his blog.