Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikipedia this week during the company's annual fundraiser, VentureBeat reported. If you have been to Wikipedia this week you would have been hard pressed to avoid Founder Jimmy Wales personal plea.
The donation was made to the Wikimedia Foundation - the company that runs Wikipedia.
"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," Wales wrote on the site.
In the plea, Wales states "if everyone reading this donated $5, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate."
Obviously he is counting the number of visitors to the site who actually open the donation plea page. Wikipedia has 454 million unique visitors a month and it can't cost over $75 million to run the site.
"This grant is an important endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation and its work, and I hope it will send a signal as we kick off our annual fundraising campaign this week," said Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner in a release.
Brin's donation came through his own nonprofit, the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which he runs with his wife, Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe - a genetics research site.
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