Wikimedia Foundation, the company behind the Wikipedia website, set themselves a target in 2008 for donations and announced today they reached it.
Running a website like Wikipedia costs a lot of money and asking for donations is a great way to cover the costs, of course you didn"t have to donate but after the founder Jimmy Wales released a personal appeal the donations kept on rolling in and in the end it totaled over $6 million.
The total number of donors is not fully known but over 125,000 people donated and in December over 50,000 of them donated near to $2 million. The money will be spent in covering the day to day runnings of the site all the way to the end of its fiscal year which is in June, the money will also be used to help some of the volunteer foundations that Wikimedia help run for example the Wikimedia Academies.
With Wikipedia being the destination for many on the Internet you would think maybe the inclusion of adverts would help the site but the founder has always said that there would never be any form of advertising on the web site.
In other news, Sue Gardner, the director of the foundation has denied that Jimmy Wales is no longer on the foundation"s board. In an interview with cnet she stated "Jimmy is a much-valued board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I expect he will hold that role permanently: I know of no reason for anyone to speculate otherwise".