Wikipedia Gets Another Source of Cash for 15th Birthday
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO — Wikipedia is getting another source of cash for its 15th birthday, expanding beyond fundraising drives that have already poured $250 million into the Internet’s leading encyclopedia.

The additional money will come from a new endowment created for Wikipedia, whose website started Jan. 15, 2001, and is now overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

The Wikimedia Endowment will start with less than $1 million donated by the estate of Jim Pacha, a software engineer who died in 2014, and then build toward a goal of accumulating $100 million by 2026. Wikipedia won’t begin drawing money from the endowment after it’s fully funded.

Wikipedia still plans to ask its users to donate money to keep advertising off its website. The additional income from the endowment will help insulate Wikipedia from economic turmoil and other potential threats to its survival, said Lisa Gruwell, chief advancement officer for the Wikimedia Foundation.

“We have a great fundraising model right now, but things on the Internet change so it’s not something we can count on forever,” Gruwell said. “Wikipedia is a pretty rare thing, and the endowment is there to ensure this cultural treasure will never go away.”

Since starting out as an experimental patchwork of information, Wikipedia has turned into indispensable tool for hundreds of millions of people looking to quickly answer questions covering everything from schlock to science.

Satisfying all that curiosity has become increasingly expensive as Wikimedia has spent more on the computers, software and other technology that keeps Wikipedia running. The foundation’s staff has also swelled from just a handful of people in its early days to about 300 employees today.

Wikipedia, though, gets all its material for free from about 80,000 volunteer editors around the world. The site’s index now spans 36 million entries in 280 languages.

Wikipedia’s growth has spurred criticism that its parent foundation has become bloated and doesn’t need to raise so much money.

Wikimedia generated revenue of $76 million while its operating expenses totaled about $53 million in its last fiscal year ending June 30. The $23 million surplus contributed to the foundation’s cushion of about $65 million in cash and short-term investments — enough to cover its projected operating expenses for all of the current fiscal year.

Wikipedia still posted notices at the top of its website throughout December asking its U.S. users to donate money in a campaign that raised another $30 million. That money will go toward Wikipedia’s future expenses, Gruwell said.

Wikimedia is “very good at begging for money, but the bottom line is they could go another 10 years without raising another dime,” said Eric Barbour, a former Wikipedia editor who is working on a book about the encyclopedia and Wikimedia’s business practices.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says the recurring fundraising campaigns and future money from the endowment are needed to run one of the Internet’s busiest websites and realize its ambition to become even more comprehensive as more people get online.

Wikipedia attracts the seventh most traffic in the world, according to the rankings of tracking service Alexa. All the other websites more popular than Wikimedia are run by profit-driven companies, including Google, Facebook and Amazon.com, that employ thousands of employees.

“We stay very mission-driven,” Wales said. “One of the things that we are focused on is the idea of having an encyclopedia available for every person in the world in their own language. As you go in that direction, these (requests for money) are some of things you need to do to build that long-term dream.”

維基百科堅拒廣告 小額捐款挺過15年

15日慶祝15歲生日的維基百科已獲得另一現金來源，資金來自特別為它成立的「維基媒體捐贈基金」，目前由舊金山的非營利機構「維基媒體基金」監督。

該捐贈基金初期將捐出100萬美元以下，資金由2014年逝世的軟體工程師帕卡名下的遺產提撥，目標是到2026年累積1億美元。

維基百科2001年1月15日上線，至今已募得2.5億美元。它計畫要求使用者繼續捐款，以免廣告入侵。

維基媒體基金的莉莎．葛拉威爾表示，來自捐贈的額外收入可使維基百科得免因經濟大環境動盪與其他因素而致生存受到威脅。她說：「我們已經建立很好的募資模式，然而由於網路不斷變化，它不是我們可以永久依賴。維基百科非常稀有，捐贈可確保這項文化資產永遠不會消失。」

維基百科點閱流量排名全球第七。對它而言，如何滿足各種不同需求的成本越來越高，因為為使維基百科得以運作，維基媒體不斷斥資擴充電腦、軟體與其他相關科技。它的人力也由早期的區區數人，擴充到目前的300人。然而維基百科收錄的資料由散布全球各地約8萬名志願編輯免費提供，目前的索引約有3600萬個條目，使用280種文字。

批評者說，維基媒體基金已經過於膨脹，不必籌募這麼多資金。至去年6月30日的上一個會計年度為止，該基金的收入約7600萬美元，開支5300萬美元，結餘提撥給總額6500萬美元現金與短期投資的備用款，足以支應當前會計年度的開銷。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/01/14/us/ap-us-funding-wikipedia.html

2016-01-15．聯合晚報．A7．焦點．編譯陳世欽