Wikipedia meets fundraising goal

SAN FRANCISCO — The nonprofit foundation that runs Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia of user-contributed articles, said Friday that it had met its $6-million fundraising goal for fiscal 2009.

With about six months left in this year’s campaign, Wikimedia Foundation Inc. said it had raised $6.2 million. A flood of donations came in after the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, posted an appeal for support in late December.

The foundation said about 50,000 contributors chipped in a total of $2 million within eight days, bringing the total number of donors to more than 125,000.

The money will go toward improving the software Wikipedia runs on as well as upgrading the servers and Internet bandwidth that accommodate the website’s traffic. Wikipedia consistently ranks among the 10 most visited websites in the world.

The foundation operates the website without advertising as a matter of principle, making donations crucial.

Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia’s fundraising prowess has expanded quickly. The foundation hauled in $1.3 million two years ago and $2.2 million last year.

In March 2008, the site received a $3-million gift from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to be dispensed in $1-million annual installments. And last month, the Stanton Foundation, created in honor of broadcast legend Frank Stanton, gave $890,000 to make Wikipedia’s editing process more user-friendly.

The Wikimedia Foundation hopes the growth in big-name donors will help improve the encyclopedia’s uneven reputation for accuracy by showing that civic-minded institutions are willing to make an investment and by funding programs that increase outreach to new contributors.