The new year celebrations is over, but the ceremony is not over for Wikipedia which is turning 10 on Jan. 15. Added to this Wikipedia has raised $16 million, allowing the service to remain ad-free for another year.

The Wikimedia Foundation, parent of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, got from 140 countries more than 500,000 donations, higher than 240,000 total contributions in 2009, with an average donation size of about $22.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said the fundraiser was the 'shortest' in the online encyclopedia's history, lasting just 50 days. Out of the $16 million donations, $13.7 million came via the Internet, while the rest came from direct checks.

In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation raised just over $8 million from more than 240,000 individual donations (up from 139,000 donations during the 2008 campaign). The average donation in 2009 was $33, and donations came in from over 100 countries.

This year is a little more incredible than most because this year we celebrate Wikipedia's tenth anniversary. It's so important that we kick the year off just like this: by fully funding the Wikimedia Foundation's budget to support Wikipedia and all the sister projects as we head into the next decade of our work together, said Wales.

Funds raised by the Wikimedia Foundation's annual campaign will contribute to the 2010-11 operating budget. For the fiscal 2010–2011, the Wikimedia Foundation has planned for $20.4 million of annual expenses, over half of which will be spent on technology.

With the official close of the 2010 Fundraiser, Wikipedia will now kick-off its 10-year birthday celebration, taking place on January 15, 2011. To support celebrations, the Foundation will be offering limited edition Wikipedia t-shirts, customizable in over 200 languages. The shirts will only be available until January 15 for a minimum donation of $25, shipping included.

From the launch of a new outreach project in Kenya to a film screening in Tel Aviv, there are currently 65 events of all kinds. Most events are free to attend or very low cost. The complete list of anniversary activities can be found at Wikipedia site.

Recently, Ukrainian Wikipedia reached 250,000 article milestone that was officially created on Dec. 21 at 8:45 pm, Kyiv Time. Since it started in 2004, Ukranian Wikipedia has grown at a steady rate, adding 50,000 articles in just the last nine months, making it the sixteenth largest language Wikipedia.

In 2010, the Ukrainian encyclopedia experienced a 64 percent increase in page views -- 860,000 people have viewed 30 million articles in December alone. Although Wikipedia is available in over 270 languages, only 35 language Wikipedias have reached the 100,000 article milestone.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.

According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation received 410 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (November 2010).

The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'quick') and encyclopedia.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis Inc., a web portal company.

Bomis Inc.'s main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a 'feeder' project for Nupedia. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.

Wikipedia has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking eighth among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers. There are currently 273 language versions of Wikipedia.

Of these language versions, English-language edition has about 3.52 million articles with total of 22.75 million, while German language has 1.17 million articles with total of 3.31 million and French has 1.05 million articles with total of 4.23 million.

Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, Hudong, Baidu Baike, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2, and Everything2.

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