Acording to a declaration made by Florence Devouard, Wikipedia may be in the slumps – “At this point, Wikipedia has the financial ressources to run its servers for about 3 to 4 months.”. This may very well be just arather extraordinary example of begging for money, or a way to put itself on the shelf, but since it is the most popular way to get information it may be possible.
Wikipedia has risen in a while to a de facto way of gathering information on the web. Either for a project, for personal information or for work, it provides. It’s one project that has put the collective intelligence of the masses to a very good use and which continues to be a must-know-of tool for everyone. This means lots of people use it. This means bandwith. And lots of it. And servers. And looots of storage. Which in the end means money.
Wikipedia is not advertising supported in any way. The Wikimedia foundation raises money to keep the project going. In a previous article (don’t remember the source) one representative of the foundation claimed that they gather $1million and they should be OK with finances.
So what will become of wikipedia? Will it introduce ads to support itself or continue to rely on donations? Either way I hope that it does not end here. There is still a lot of information that needs to become available.