The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit parent company of Wikipedia and its anyone-can-edit brethren, announced on Monday that it has begun its annual fund-raiser. The organization has said that proceeds from the fund-raiser, which runs through December 22, will be used to pay for technological and corporate improvements as well as program development--specifically expanding its operations to global regions and languages that are currently underrepresented.
"We believe that everyone in the world should have access to education, regardless of race, nationality, gender, age or economic background," Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales, who also started a for-profit spin-off, Wikia, said in a statement. "We also believe that everyone has knowledge to contribute. Through the public's support and the Foundation's continued efforts, we expect to have a similar impact on communities in the most remote areas of the world as we have in more developed parts of the globe."
For example, the Wikimedia Foundation--which recently relocated from St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Francisco--will hold an event in South Africa in November with the aim to expand Wikipedia's reach among African languages.
Exact data from last year's Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser is not yet available because the organization does not expect its audit for the 2006-2007 fiscal year to be finished until late November. The Wikimedia Foundation is not announcing a target for this year's fund-raiser but has stated that its 2007-2008 operating budget is $4.6 million.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that brought forth wiki-based sites like Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikisource, the Wikimedia Commons, and of course the iconic Wikipedia, is packing up and moving.
The organization announced on Tuesday that at the end of January it will relocate from its longtime home of St. Petersburg, Fla., to the tech hub of San Francisco after choosing from six candidate cities in a search to find a headquarters close to major media, research universities and a thriving technology scene. "(San Francisco's) proximity to Asia in particular is expected to enable the Foundation to form closer ties with volunteers and potential partners in that part of the world," a release from the Wikimedia Foundation explained. "This is a key goal for the Foundation."
The Wikimedia Foundation has been based in St. Petersburg since it was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2003. While it currently only employs six people, the organization has said that new hiring will take place in anticipation of the move to San Francisco.
Wales' for-profit company, Wikia, has offices in San Mateo, Calif., and New York, as well as an overseas branch in Poland.
Friday morning, at the O'Reilly Open Source conference in Portland, Ore., Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, announced the release of an open-source Web crawling site called Grub.
Grub was acquired from LookSmart under the open-source project Wikia. The platform, now available for downloading and testing, is built on users donating their personal computer power. It's meant to operate through open protocol and community collaborative added functions combined with the wiki.
Last year, Wales claimed that Internet search as we know it is broken. Grub is one of his attempts to gather open-source technologies to organize free content on the Web.
Please join CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman as he interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
The interview will take place at the CNET Second Life bureau (free Second Life account required) on Thursday, May 10 at 1 p.m. PDT.
The conversation will cover a wide range of topics, including Wales' for-profit venture, Wikia, the future of Wikipedia, competition for Wikipedia and the free encyclopedia's assault on Google. Come take part and ask Jimmy a question.
Looks like Wikipedia and its founder, Jimmy Wales, have turned into legitimately global icons--they're getting pranked overseas in addition to domestically. Wales was the keynote speaker at the Australian "Education.au" conference last week, as reported by the Brisbane Times (linked via TechCrunch), and in the question-and-answer session that followed his address, he was subject to the antics of a well-known Aussie prankster.
One of the inquisitive attendees happened to be Andrew Hansen, a cast member from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's sketch comedy show The Chaser's War On Everything, which features a recurring segment called "Mr. Ten Questions." In the style of the show, Hansen stood up and asked Wales ten questions in a row without giving the Wikipedia founder the opportunity to answer. They started off mildly, with "First, how are you enjoying Australia?" but grew rapidly more absurd, including "Why does everyone in IT look so nerdy, yet you look like a daytime soap star?" and "There are 1.7 million articles on Wikipedia; how long did it take you to write them all?" Hansen's final question for Wales was,"How do you feel about the fact that when I looked you up on Wikipedia this morning I changed your page to say that you were a teenage drug lord from Malaysia?
Apparently, Wales took it pretty well, and even managed to answer four of them. The full list of questions (warning: some profane language) can be found in the Brisbane Times' article. The Chaser segment featuring Wales has yet to air, but TechCrunch commenters hinted that it will likely wind up (legally) online.
You may recall The Chaser as the TV show that was temporarily pulled from YouTube when the video-sharing site (somewhat gullibly) obeyed the terms of a fake cease-and-desist letter from an Australian teenager pretending to be from the ABC. It also gained some viral video momentum in the States when it planted fake "terrorists" near Sydney landmarks in an attempt to see how long it took for security officers to respond to their "suspicious activities."
I don't think we'll see Jimmy Wales as a target on Jackass or on Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd any time soon, but the influential Web figure does have a history of getting pranked here in the U.S. (albeit indirectly). Perhaps the most famous instance of this was when when late-night comedian Stephen Colbert exhorted his viewers to log onto Wikipedia and alter certain entries, a gag that crashed the encyclopedia's servers and resulted in Mr. Colbert's account being banned.
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