Yes, of course I donated, who ever sees Jimmy Wales face and doesn’t donate, why they’d be a monster.

From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. 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. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

If everyone reading this donated $10, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $10, $20, $30 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder

Yes Jimmy, Wikipedia is like a library except in your version, you can rewrite the books to make them better. How good is that. Of course unlike a library, you can’t sit in it, and get the benefit of its people, and feel its warmth in the winter and its cool in the summer, or any of the other myriad good things of a physical space. But, go donate anyway at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising

Happy birthday Wikipedia!

The whole world loves Wikipedia – it has become one of the top go to places for easily accessible, crowdsourced, reviewed information on the internet. To celebrate their tenth anniversary, Wikipedia are running a number of global and local events, as well as making a raft of images available to share the Wikipedia love around the internet.

Australia celebrates 10 years of Wikipedia, logo by David Peters (Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Over at CNN, there’s an interesting Q&A with Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, who talks about how far the organisation has come in 10 years and what he sees Wikipedia’s future being.

There’s also a brief video message from Jimmy – his call to action for your continued support of Wikipedia into the future.

Wikipedia is turning 10

Click on the image to view the edit

Do you remember a time when only librarians knew the answer to everything? Well it was 10 years ago next week.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been around for ages … but how much do you really know about it? If you can’t be bothered reading the About page on Wikipedia, maybe this Common Craft video will help.

It’s all so GLAM

Last week, Liam Wyatt, the British Museum‘s first ever volunteer Wikipedian in residence, gave a presentation at the National Library discussing some of the recommendations from last year’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia conference, held at the Australian War Memorial. Liam raised some very interesting points in regards to ownership, usage, Creative Commons licensing and copyright of digitised materials held in cultural institutions, as well as talking about the ways that volunteers can play a valuable role in contributing to an institution’s projects, something which this blog has previously touched upon. If you couldn’t get to the NLA last week to see the presentation in person, or want to be reminded of the things that Liam covered, check it out here.