Wikipedia entered 2007 as one of the most visited 10 websites in the world. What could be more relevant as a proof of success? Since they’re trying to be a reliable source of information, they’re predicting they will need additional funds, funds they cannot raise without your help.

In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates dramatically increasing spending to keep up with server and traffic capacity demands, add new staff on the organizational level, improve the software and develop methods to better ensure high quality content, all while making progress toward their goal of giving free knowledge to everyone.

They have put together a fund raising. By donating, you will be making an investment in Wikipedia and all of their associated projects, helping to ensure those resources remain accessible and meaningful as their universe of users grows. At the time I’m writing this article, the total donations are only a step away from one million dollars.

After about two weeks ago there was a huge boost from $402,000 to $689,000 because of one contribution by an anonymous friend on 2006-12-27 at 22:17:00 for the amount of $286,800, Wikipedia is closer than ever from the huge figure. Congratulations.

If you are interested into following in close-up the full donations process, this is the official web page.

As some of you already heard Wikipedia banned all of Qatar for anonymous edits. It seems that the only ISP there is Qtel and more amazing they use only ONE IP address for the whole country to exit the Internet. That’s not wise even for a small country such as Qatar, I mean business users here in Romania receive up to 3 free IP addresses so it’s not that expensive.

Anyway the idea is that Wikipedia banned that single IP and all users who didn’t have a account to that date couldn’t edit content at all. The Wikipedia staff says this action was taken due to excessive spamming and vandalism from that IP, and I don’t blame them, IP banning is one of the most used means to get read of spam. Bottom line is that users from Qatar were prevented to edit anything if they didn’t have an account.

Well this isn’t such a big deal after all but many are afraid that (and I quote):” Services that we are used to and that are indispensable to us could be denied from us suddenly”. Well in my opinion that’s a little exaggerated given the fact that no one will cut your Internet access if you have done nothing wrong and furthermore there are endless possibilities to avoid restrictions such as using a proxy server or using software like Psiphon.

What can I say? Try to use your own public IP address and don’t be a spammer!