Funding: Difference between revisions
atually, no, you cannot, it's a redirect to some foundation: page that doesn't contain these informations |
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Revision as of 20:55, 24 March 2010
Historical content!, moved text from village pump on 5 Feb 2003.
Funding matters. It determines who runs the IP Death Squad and kicks people on or off it - under the misleading title of sysop - some think this is probably not run as democratically as it should be, and have other ideas of fairness, but until the funding issue is resolved that's unlikely to matter.
Right now Jimbo Wales is the Wikipedia's sole benefactor. He pays for the Wikipedia's bandwidth and for its domain names (which are all cheap anyway) and last year he bought a new $US 3,000 server solely for Wikipedia and its related projects. On the other hand, he has set policies unilaterally and doesn't seem that interested in governance - although he's offered to set up competing projects with the software.
There are serious plans, however, to form a non-profit organization to manage Wikipedia's and Wiktionary's finances. Such an organization would be able to accept donations. It could also recruit ideal Wikipedia board members.
- Jimbo has stated that he doesn't need any help right now supporting Wikipedia. He has also stated that he would continue to at least provide bandwidth for Wikipedia and Wiktionary even after the non-profit is set-up. So financially there is no crisis. We do however need a developer who is an expert in database optimization. --mav
- I've got meetings next week with people who I might persuade to fund qualified experts ( proof is in the pudding! ) for this open source programming initiative. Rate determining steps to are unknown at this point: I don't know how long it may take to secure funding. But I have started so there will be funds made available either through an existing NGO, Canadian Government or Venture Communist source. -- Two16
Business sponsors
Past and continuing corporate sponsors of the Wikimedia Foundation includes
- 17 february 2010 : 2M USD from Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation. This grant is unrestricted.
- 25 august 2009 : 2M USD from Omidyar Network. This grand is divided in 4 equal part which comes at a 6 months interval. The last quarter of this grant is dependant on milestones.
- 20 august 2009 : 500k USD from the Hewlett Foundation. This grant is restricted to operational support
- 26 january 2009 : 100k USD from the Mozilla Foundation. This grand is restricted to "help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies."
- 3rd december 2008 : 890k USD from the Stanton Foundation. This grant is restricted to usability improvment (see wmf:Wikipedia Usability Initiative)
- 27 march 2008 : 500k USD from Neeru et Vinod Khosla
- 24 march 2008 : 3M USD from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This grant is divided into 3 yearly grants of 1 million USD and dedicated to "financial and operational sustainability, increasing quality, increasing and broadening participation, and distributing our material beyond the wiki environment."
Future potential sponsors are enumerated at List of potential business sponsors.