Hope they will spend more $$ on servers... It's kinda slow sometimes.

Haochi is right, they should focus more on the servers and making Wikipedia more user friendly.

Where are they getting the money from ? Donations.

I think they should start putting some Adsense.

>> It's kinda slow sometimes.

Use Google cache.

Hi Sohil,

Wikipedia gets its money from donations. You can watch the daily stream of money flow at http://fundraising.wikimedia.org

This season usually marks a time when we have increasing numbers of people coming to wikipedia. Therefor, the Wikimedia Foundation has agreed to increase the number of servers. We are now at 260 (or more) servers. Most of them are listed at meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Servers.

This is a list of requests per second for the last weeks:
http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/reqstats/reqstats-monthly.png

That's nice info you Mathais ..but what do you mean when you say

"This season usually marks a time when we have increasing numbers of people coming to wikipedia"

are you saying spikes rates have been identified as a "seasonal" phenomenon in the wiki property ??

pd: The fall is the time of the year when the traffic doubles in a rather short time. We have seen this phenomenon in 2004, 2005 and now in 2006.

Thanks for the info Mathias and good luck with your plans :)

It's obviously students doing class papers (:-) ?)

Ahhhhhhhhh Seth, now it does make sense .. after all, the wiki is becoming the landing zone / center for research activities!!

I do most of my recreational Wikipedia reading in October/November. :

What's grinded me, especially lately, is how Wikipedia is such a useful reference but how it has such awful built-in search. Sometimes I search through it externally using Google, but that's still not the easiest.

I do look forward to more details of copyrighted works being set free!

torley: We are aware of this. We are using tools like google sitemaps to make it easier for search engines to crawl the data. Currently, I recommend using google/yahoo/ask.com (or the wikipedia search of web.de for german content) rather than our internal lucene stuff.

Does anyone know what is the value of wikipedia property ?? someone trotted out $580M and another person ups it to $5B!!

Afterall, if they (Jimmy et al) place ad's this becomes the hottest ad placement proptery too and still keep it as a non -profit company.. Give the money to some foundation ..!!

When you think of the YouTube price as what the market considers "fair" at this moment then I'd say $580M is much too low for Wikipedia. After all, they're in the top 3 for a huge amount of important Google searches. It's like buying a piece of the web's knowledge... and aren't they one of the 10 (20? 30?) most visited sites on earth or something?

Ii think its within the 10 most visited sites!!

Wikipedia reportedly gets 2,000 page requests a second. Can someone do the math on monetizing traffic of that magnitude?