Except for those readers living in a cave, you’ve probably been to Wikipedia in the past two months and seen the banners for our annual fundraiser. I’d like to use this blog post to throw out a couple “behind-the-scenes” tidbits of information about the fundraiser and about Wikipedia itself. First, for those of you who aren’t really all that familiar with Wikipedia outside casual use, or never heard of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)– here’s the tl;dr version. Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia. We have less than 60 full time employees, almost everything else is done by volunteers. We are the #5 most visited website on the internet by ComScore rating, though other ratings have us at various ranks between 4 and 8 in the top 10 most popular sites. Yesterday, we accounted for about a half percent of all the pageviews on the internet.  According to our ComScore data, “comScore estimates that, during the month of January 2010, 365 million unique visitors (UVs) viewed our projects from a personal computer, which it estimates was a “reach” of 29.5% of the 1.24 billion worldwide PC-based web browser audience:”

That’s a lot of reach. But what many people don’t know is that the Wikimedia Foundation is not like most other companies out there, certainly not any others in the top 10. So without further ado, here is a list of things you may not have known about the Wikimedia Foundation and our annual fundraiser.

• Out of the top-10 websites by traffic, we are the only non-profit.
• Out of the top-10 websites by traffic, we are the primary educational site.
• Out of the top-10 websites by traffic, we have:
  • the lowest budget
  • the least expenses
  • the smallest number of employees
  • the greatest number of volunteers
  • *probably* the most number of languages.
  • No advertisement.
• The 2010 fundraiser kicked off Nov. 2010 and will run through the end of January.
  • Our goal is $16 million (which, added to previous efforts, supports a $20 million budget approximately).
  • As of 12/14/2010, we are at $8.8 million of that goal.
  • Graphical banner advertisements are significantly better than text-only advertisements.
    • We found this out last year, but re-confirmed this year in A-B testing (side-by-side testing of graphic and text banners).
    • Editor appeal banners outperform other graphical banners by a long shot.
    • Jimmy banners outperform non-Jimmy banners by a decent amount, usually by .5% click rate, and outperform text banners significantly (2-3% click rate, vs. >.5% or less.)
    • We managed to get a Sue banner performing about Jimmy today. We were very proud of this. Then we found out that Jimmy wrote a new appeal on the back of a napkin on an Aeroflot flight, and that appeal (currently testing right now) is blowing everything else out of the water.
    • It’s so good, in fact, that by around 6pm UTC we had exceeded the previous 24 hour fundraising mark, with 6 more hours to go.
• When we test, we run different banners at various weights of allocation. That means that when you refresh the page, you may see a different banner (some possibly with an extremely low percent chance of appearing)
• Banners, when clicked on, can send you to multiple landing pages, to allow us to simultaneously test both banners and landing page text.
• We accept donations in a lot of different languages, via credit card, paypal, primarily. (except Indian Rupees: our provider won’t take them. We know, and we’re looking for a way around it).
• Our fundraising team includes several Community Associates, like myself, who are long-standing community members hired to ensure that the voice of the community is heard during the fundraiser.
• To that end, we’ve brought in several editors to make their own “editor appeals”. Some examples are LilaRoja, Liam, Abbas, and Sage Ross.
• The “category 1 chapters” (i.e., UK, Germany, Italy, etc.) run their own versions, which is why some landing pages/banners might have discrepancies. They can do their fundraising completely different than ours, and their donations go primarily to them. This is most noticeable with the German chapter, which uses pages like this.
• Yes, we know Jimmy is staring at you. We don’t like it any more than you do, but it brings in the most money.
• We had problems with setting up recurring donations. Those should be fixed now. Not everywhere accepts it.
• Donors over $250 get a receipt for IRS purposes. Donors not requiring an IRS receipt will receive an email from Sue that acts as a confirmation and receipt.  Additionally, Paypal donors can use paypal receipts, and credit card donors will see the charges on their card.
• We are using the hashtag #keepitfree on Twitter, and tweeting from the @WikiContribute account. Once you donate, you’ll be able to share your donation on social media. We encourage you to do so!
• We are also accepting community tweets on WikiContribute. If you are interested in tweeting for us, contact me at drosenthal@wikimedia.org.
• We are encouraging contribution through non-financial means as well. For an example, check out the Contribution Team, which I developed for the fundraiser.
• Finally, catch us on IRC on the Freenode server, in #wikimedia-fundraising and #wikimedia-contrib, or on meta at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/!

I hope this list helped you learn a little more about the Wikimedia Foundation, our fundraiser, what we’re doing, and why we unfortunately are cluttering up Wikipedia pages with our banners. Please donate, and help keep knowledge (and Wikipedia) free.