Sloan Foundation Donates $3 Million to Wikipedia Non-Profit Organization

Wikipedia, the mammoth Internet encyclopedia built by volunteers, is getting its largest donation ever – $3 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The award, to come in $1million installments over each of the next three years, will help the Wikimedia Foundation become more financially secure as it hires more staff and seeks to improve the quality and reach of Wikipedia content, foundation leaders said. The Wikimedia Foundation said it would use the Sloan grant for software enhancements.

“We think it will pave the way towards more donations as it is a signal that a major foundation sees good in what we are doing,” said Jimmy Wales, the project’s leader and a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation.

“And it should take away a lot of the questions people have had about whether we will need advertising to survive.”

Doron Weber, a Sloan Foundation representative, said in a statement that Wikipedia “represents a quantum leap” in the collection and organization of knowledge.

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” — Jimmy. Wales, Founder of Wikipedia.

Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a blend of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is now the seventh-most popular Web site in the U.S., according to comScore Inc. More than half the Wikimedia Foundation’s $4.6 million budget covers the servers and Internet bandwidth to handle all that traffic. It also supports Wikipedia in dozens of other languages and affiliated free projects such as dictionaries and news sites.

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation said it would use the donation from Sloan Foundation for software enhancements, including one that helps Wikipedia editors to grade article quality. Wikimedia leaders also envision doing more outreach to new contributors and creating educational content for people without computers.