Thursday, February 3, 2011

The World Shattering Wiki... Appeals of 2010: People Won't Forget for Long

 WikiPedia 

This banner  with the  goal of $16 million USD for year 2010. 

 

And the way they achieved it so quickly! No doubt, in the history of Wikipedia  this banner along with the below one were the most successful and effective appeals to support this wonderful organization, and definitely one of the most memorable in 2010.

 

This was the appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales


I got a lot of funny looks ten years ago when I started talking to people about Wikipedia.

Let’s just say some people were skeptical of the notion that volunteers from all across the world could come together to create a remarkable pool of human knowledge – all for the simple purpose of sharing. 

No ads. No agenda. No strings attached.

A decade after its founding, nearly 400 million people use Wikipedia and its sister sites every month – almost a third of the Internet-connected world.

It is the 5th most popular website in the world – but Wikipedia isn’t anything like a commercial website. It is a community creation, written by volunteers making one entry at a time. You are part of our community. And I’m writing today to ask you to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Together, we can keep it free of charge and free of advertising. We can keep it open – you can use the information in Wikipedia any way you want. We can keep it growing – spreading knowledge everywhere, and inviting participation from everyone.

Each year at this time, we reach out to ask you and others all across the Wikimedia community to help sustain our joint enterprise with a modest donation of $20, $35, $50 or more.

If you value Wikipedia as a source of information – and a source of inspiration – I hope you’ll choose to act right now. 

All the best,
Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia

P.S. Wikipedia is about the power of people like us to do extraordinary things. People like us write Wikipedia, one word at a time. People like us fund it, one donation at a time. It's proof of our collective potential to change the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WikiLeaks




"...could become as important a journalistic tool
as the Freedom of Information Act."
                                                                                  -TIME Magazine

WikiLeaks really shattered the world on 28 November 2010 by publishing the first 220 of 251,287 leaked confidential—but not top secret— diplomatic cables from 274 US embassies around the world, dated from 28 December 1966 to 28 February 2010. It had plans to release the entirety of the cables in phases over several months. Which it's still doing...

WikiLeaks has received praise as well as criticism. Supporters of WikiLeaks in the media and academia have commended it for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, supporting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. At the same time, several U.S. government officials have criticised WikiLeaks for exposing classified information, harming national security, and compromising international diplomacy.

After launching WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website in year 2006, the organization won the number of awards. And above all, it has just been nominated for 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.  What a surprise! Also, sometime back the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, was named the Readers' Choice for 'Time's Perosn of the Year' in 2010.

Courtesy : WikiPedia &  Wikimedia

3 comments:

muhammadrazzaq said...

One of the things that I wanted to make sure made the move safely were my precious picture negatives of my babies growing up.

rose_colored_thoughts said...

i remembered way back grade school how expensive encyclopedias were, people who just did not have the money had trouble acessing information. Now, with Wiki around, everyone gets a fair piece of the pie. I hope, people continue to help through donations to keep the info stream going. :)

Dhananjay said...

I can't agree more ! It's filled with the vast and precious knowledge about virtually everything, which the world has now used to look for every single day..