Facebook donates $1 million to Wikipedia
Facebook has donated $1 million to Wikimedia Endowment, a fund to financially support the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
The donation should help the fund in its goal of safeguarding the long-term existence of the online encyclopedia. Technology giants such as Facebook make grateful use of the sea of information on Wikipedia. The social media site introduced another feature earlier this year that provides additional information about an article’s source through the encyclopedia. To thank Wikipedia for all that free knowledge, Facebook put a million dollars into the Wikimedia Endowment fund this week. The company is thus following the example of e-commerce giant Amazon, which already donated a million dollars to Wikipedia in September.
“In its nearly 18 years of existence, Wikipedia has become a trusted source of information for hundreds of millions of people,” said Lisa Gruwell, Wikimedia’s Chief Advancement Officer, in response to the donation. “Thanks to the Endowment Fund, we can secure that knowledge not only for today’s knowledge seekers, but also for generations to come. We are delighted that Facebook is investing in the future of Wikipedia and free knowledge for everyone.”
Wikimedia Endowment was established in January 2016 to ensure the independence of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The original goal was to raise $100 million. Today, according to Venturebeat, less than fifty million has been raised. Incidentally, not all tech giants are equally generous to Wikipedia. For example, YouTube announced in March that it would provide dubious videos with excerpts from the encyclopedia, in an attempt to fight fake news. Wikipedia was not reimbursed for this and stuck its dissatisfaction don’t hide about it.