Wikimedia Foundation Plans to Expand

The Wikimedia Foundation, operator of the Web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia, plans to add forty-four employees in the next year, roughly doubling the size of its staff, and raise $20 million to support an enhanced vision for Wikipedia, the New York Times reports.

Speaking in Poland at the sixth annual Wikimania conference, Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner announced that by hiring more employees and raising more money, the organization hopes to nearly double, to 680 million, the number of monthly unique visitors to Wikipedia by 2015. The expansion will focus on Africa, Central and Latin America, and Asia, with new offices to be opened in Brazil and India. Gardner also said that Wikimedia wants to encourage the development of Wikipedias in languages that are less represented on the Internet, with the goal of one hundred Wikipedias with at least 125,000 articles, and plans to add a separate data center, probably in Virginia, to improve the Wikipedia infrastructure so there are fewer service disruptions.

Before the arrival of Gardner in 2007, Wikipedia was operated out of a small office in St. Petersburg, Florida, with a staff of six and an annual budget of barely $1 million. Today, the San Francisco-based organization has all the trappings of a large, modern nonprofit organization and operates the equipment to publish and maintain one of the most popular Web sites in the world.

The expansion plans come after a year of strategic analysis guided by outside consultants who were asked to come up with a five-year plan for the organization’s various projects, most notably Wikipedia. “Prior to the strategic planning project, I didn’t feel I had a mandate from the Wikimedia community. Post-strategic planning, I feel I have a mandate,” said Gardner, who also promised flexibility in the organization’s growth plan. “Nobody knows what this will look like. When we make mistakes we will course-correct. Forty-four employees could be twenty-six. The work is what is important.”

Cohen, Noam. “Wikipedia’s Foundation Plans Expansion.” New York Times 7/09/10.