Wikimedia to Sloan: Thanks a million, thanks a million, thanks a million

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 26 March 2008 12:22

Home IT

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia and other projects, has attracted substantial funding from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.

Wikimedia will receive $US1 million per year for three years.

"We are extremely grateful for this support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation," said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

"This institutional support from Sloan will enable us to make progress on some key goals: increasing quality, broadening participation, and distributing free knowledge to people without Internet connectivity."

Wikimedia plans to have articles graded for quality by experienced editors, to train particular groups such as academics and older people to contribute to projects, and to begin the distribution of content in offline formats such as DVDs and books.

"We are delighted to support the Wikimedia Foundation and to help develop its organizational capacity and improve the quality of its flagship, Wikipedia," said Doron Weber, Sloan program director for universal access to recorded knowledge.

"As the largest encyclopedia in human history and one of the top ten web sites in the world, Wikipedia represents a quantum leap in collecting human knowledge from diverse sources, organizing it without commercial or other bias, and making it freely available to people everywhere."

The Sloan Foundation supports research and education in science, technology, economic performance and the quality of American life.