Wikipedia launches fundraising campaign

The sixth Wikipedia Forever campaign has been launched in a bid to raise $7.5m (around £4.5m) to maintain and develop the site.

Wikipedia costs $9.4m (£5.6m) per year to run, which pays for operating costs such as bandwith and servers and to keep the website a free-to-use source of information.

The funds raised by this latest campaign will go towards this annual figure and will also be used to develop the site. Wikipedia currently has 13 million articles in over 250 languages.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation said the campaign is an "opportunity to celebrate Wikipedia and everything it stands for - freedom, sharing, openness, collaboration, the power of knowledge - and to help keep Wikipedia free for everyone to use, now and into the future".

The campaign will run until January 2010 with adverts on the main site. Other sites supported by the Wikimedia Foundation such as Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons will also run the campaign and people can donate at http://donate.wikimedia.org.

It's also possible to donate by text from the US by texting 'WIKI' to 25383.