The Wikimedia Foundation is the organization behind Wikipedia and similar projects like Wikinews and Wikibooks. On November 5, 2008, they announced their annual fundraising campaign with a goal of raising $6 million dollars. Click here for the details of that campaign. They met their goal in early January.

About a week ago, they released a bunch of anonymized data about the donations, asking the community to sift through it and glean any insights they might find. I came across that data release today and was intrigued, so I uploaded it to swivel.com to see what goodies lay in store. Links to the data on swivel.com, plus other folks’ analysis can be found on the Wikimedia meta-wiki.

The Wikimedia Foundation had already raised about $2 million from the Sloan Foundation, the Stanton Foundation, Arcadia, and an anonymous donor prior to November 5. The rest came from small(ish) donations from oodles of donors—that’s the data in the recent data dump. Here are some summary statistics from that data:

Total number of donations: 137,925

Average donation: $34.42 USD

Number of countries: 132

I wondered which countries had donated the most, so I asked swivel.com to make this graph:

It looks like the US donors gave the lion’s share, with Germany coming in a distant second. There’s a lot more analysis you can do, but I think the above stats are the coolest. If you want to dig further, click here.

Note: There are some (about 15) zero donations but they don’t really affect the above numbers much so I left them in.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Argentina en la oficina de la Fundación Wikimedia by zuirdj on Flickr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.