Google co-founder donates $500,000 to Wikipedia

by Steven Mostyn - Nov 22 2011, 10:40

If you regularly visit Wikipedia, chances are you’ve noticed that founder Jimmy Wales is presently attempting to drum up funding to help keep the world’s favorite online encyclopedia from dropping offline.

Luckily for Wales—who thrusts his begging bowl at users every year—Wikipedia has some affluent fans keen to maintain their access to such an expansive database of knowledge.

Two such supporters are Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, who this week donated a massive $500,000 USD to the cause through the official Brin Wojcicki Foundation.

Although undoubtedly a generous donation, it remains something of a drop in the ocean when considering that Wales needs to amass a total of $28.3 million USD in order to meet the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation’s annual budgetary requirements.

“If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be over today,” he outlined through the official Wikipedia website.

Although the addition of site-wide advertising would instantly relieve the pressure on Wikipedia, Wales remains adamant that a publicly accessible encyclopedia is no place for hawking products and services.

“Google might have close to a million servers… Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff,” he commented. “We have 679 servers and 95 staff. Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month—with billions of page views.”

“Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil,” he added. “But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.”

Brin and Wojcicki’s cash injection follows on from a whopping $3.5 million USD donated recently by the Stanton Foundation.

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