Wikipedia may be a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project by a community of volunteer editors employing a wiki-based editing system. it’s the most important and hottest general reference book on the planet Wide Web. it’s also one among the 15 hottest websites ranked by Alexa, as of June 2020. It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, and was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name as a portmanteau of the words “wiki” and “encyclopedia”. Initially, an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. With 6.1 million articles, English Wikipedia is that the largest of the quite 300 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises quite 54 million articles attracting 1.5 billion unique visitors per month.
The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001, and January 13, 2001, respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, as one English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia list .
Believe it or not, we Indians depend upon Wikipedia. Despite knowing the very fact that each one the knowledge on the location won’t be real, Wikipedia is one among the primary links that we open when conducting research online. But Indian readers found something strange on Wikipedia. In a clumsy emotional post, the non-profit run website asked its “knowledge lovers” in India, to donate for his or her site. The message further said, “Wikipedia is hosted by a not-for-profit organization. We don’t have ads. We don’t have shareholders. we’ve donors, and that we exist solely due to donations from our readers, like you”.
India is one among Wikipedia’s leadership markets. In November 2019, Indians visited Wikipedia over 771 million times which is its fifth-highest number of views. But Wikipedia isn’t asking donations just from Indian users. they’re asking people to donate from everywhere the world!
This is not the primary time that Wikipedia has issued such messages for the donation. Wikipedia within the past had asked its readers to donate to stay the non-profit site going. during a 2015 blog, WMF had clarified that the donation helps the organization to pay salaries of all editors and staff. The fund also helps to stay Wikipedia and its sister sites secure, fast, and simply accessible.
“Based on guidance from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, our reserve amounts to at least one year of the budget ,” said Samantha Lien, a spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation. “If there have been circumstances that affected our ability to boost those funds during that period, we could find yourself in an urgent situation the reserve may be a safety net to guard Wikipedia against such an opportunity .”
but we have to do some charity for Wikipedia there the link https://donate.wikimedia.org/
This article taken reference from inventiva