I've just spotted the announcement by founder Jimmy Wales that Wikipedia has met its fundraising target of $6 million to secure its operational expenditure for the fiscal year to June 2009.
The funds are made up, apparently, of $4 million from ~125,000 private donors with the balance of $2 million coming from 'foundation support'.
This announcement prompted a couple of observations / questions...
1) This reaffirms that [electronic] publishing - even in wikis - costs real money.
2) Is it only me that finds Wikipedia's mission 'to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising' slightly ironic since it isn't free at all?!
3) I thought at first that it was quite impressive to run such a goliath enterprise with only 23 employees... but now I am not so sure. Surely the idea was to provide the infrastructure (i.e. one website) and let us users get on with it...
4) I have no idea how Wikipedia's costs pan out... but if (and I admit it is a big if) their salary bill if half of their expenditure then the average salary for a Wikipedia employee woule be over $250,000...
5) $4 million from 125,000 donors equates to an average of $32 per donor. Not a lot, I guess...
6) So this secures them financially until June 2009. But even at a relatively modest average of $32 per donor, are people really going to put their hands in their pockets year in, year out to continue funding Wikipedia?
7) I wonder if they'll end up selling it to Walmart....
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