Santa Loves Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia

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A couple of years ago, I was listening to one of the internet’s most influential people at Wikicamp, Chennai. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia is quite different from the other internet entrepreneurs in a variety of aspects. Wales had a big altruistic attitude of making all Information available on the internet to every user and started the wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia has a very small workforce of 23 people and is a non-profit organization. Wikipedia is ranked 8th most visited website on the internet, you should be able to imagine the workload of the servers. It takes huge effort and $6 million dollars to keep wikipedia accessible to every user on the internet.

While google answers and yahoo answers have been monetized, though in a different fashion, the information available is not as exhaustive and accurate as that of Wikipedia. Millions of users across the world use the Wikipedia and hundreds of them participate in creating and maintaining the content. Maintaining a huge network, adding the content and fighting the spam bots is not an easy task. Jimmy wales took a bold step in writing an appeal letter to the wikipedia users, asking support from users themselves. It is very good to see that hundreds of volunteers have contributed and the statistics shows a few uprights around Christmas.

Wikimedia has collected over 31868 USD in this week, with a few contributors making huge donations in the likes of 3000 USD, 2000 USD. Santa seems to show some love towards Wikipedia, Thanks to all the people who have made a donation, every cent counts. Wikipedia has been assisted you numerous times, it is time the community gives something back to wikipedia.

Ways in which you can help Wikipedia

• Make a direct donation to wikipedia (Every dollar counts)
• Hint a friend, who uses wikipedia a lot
• Blog about Jimmy Wales’ appeal letter
• Contribute in terms of effort by wiki gardening – add, edit, clean, correct, update information in wiki

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