Wikimedia receives $3.5million USD grant from Stanton Foundation
October 5th, 2011Today we were very pleased to announce another amazing grant from the US based Stanton Foundation, and our largest grant yet. The grant totals $3.6 million USD, and will fund major investments in the technology infrastructure that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects – specifically to serve our growing readership.
On the grant, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner offered the following:
The Stanton Foundation is a long-time funder of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I am thrilled they’re increasing their investment in us. The Stanton Foundation was one of the first institutions to recognize that Wikipedia is a serious educational endeavour that’s having a significant impact on people around the world. I will always be grateful to them for taking a risk in first funding us, many years ago.
The Stanton Foundation was created by the American broadcasting executive and media pioneer Frank Stanton, who, in 1960, organized the first-ever televised presidential debate. Among its previous grants to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Stanton Foundation provided $1.2 million in 2010 for the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative, a program designed to improve the quality and quantity of information related to public policy topics in Wikipedia. The project resulted in 800 American students at universities such as Harvard and University of California Berkeley adding the equivalent of 5,800 printed pages of material to Wikipedia, and has now been expanded to include universities in Canada and India.
Our heartfelt thanks to the Stanton Foundation for helping us bring Wikipedia and its sister projects to even more people around the world.
Jay Walsh, Communications
October 5th, 2011 at 20:42
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October 5th, 2011 at 23:52
careful, the title says 3.5 and the text 3.6 :)
I have a question about the funding of “major investments in the technology infrastructure that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects”
what I understood of that sentence what it would be mainly about servers/datacenter related things ; but then, a mail on foundation-l ( http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-October/069387.html ) indicate it will be used for the making of a new interface, which there is no mention of on this post.
I assume there’s enough of money for these both (and more!), but could you please add a bit of clarification about that ?
October 7th, 2011 at 05:15
Forza!