Happy Birthday Wikipedia!

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Giphy

For 15 years, Wikipedia has been an amazing source of information, especially for the millennial generation. And also, once we figured out how to edit pages it became a great source of fun. (Don’t tell me you never edited a page and wrote something silly.) The site even made a list of its top 15 most edited pages.

The Wikimedia Foundation is very serious about ensuring that Wikipedia stays the internet’s best free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. They hope to accomplish this goal by raising a total of $100m over the next 10 years, through donations from the public and other philanthropic sources that support the value of the site.

When he spoke to The Guardian, co-founder Jimmy Wales said, “A lot of people are completely missing the point that as people come online in the developing world, they’re doing a lot of the same things we do: they’re getting on Facebook, going on Google, reading and editing Wikipedia…This inherent idea that these are the ‘other’ – alien and mysterious people who live in a very strange way – that evaporates when you realise the tens of millions of people coming online are just normal people.”

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Giphy

Another interviewee, Birmingham City University lecturer Mark Brill, addressed what the Wikipedia team should improve on this year, especially in the mobile and multimedia space. He said, “…millennials increasingly need their information delivered via small video-clips and other multimedia. Wikipedia has a huge challenge if it wants to connect with users in the long-term, to keep up with changing needs and making content engaging, open and inclusive.”

Wikipedia’s mission to remain ad free and collect the funds necessary to operate independently well into its future is a noble one. The idea of free information is something that we have enjoyed for 15 years, and hopefully something we will be able to pass on to generations that come after us. Many experts question the user funding model that the site has used over the years, but Wales says, “Financially, we have been very prudent and careful, and very deliberate.” So any donation to Wikipedia is a gift for free educational content that we all can use at no charge.

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