Wikipedia | A viewpoint on its current appeal for monetary help to Indian diaspora

Since the advent of popular internet access and surfing in India in late 1990s and early 2000, Wikipedia(dot)org has been like a vast encyclopedia to many of us apart from the ubiquitous Google Search Engine. 

Though, technically, Google was founded in 1998 and Wikipedia was founded in 2001, the respective outreach and popularity of both the entities incrementally skyrocketed almost hand in hand in the general period of year 2000 to 2005, in case of Indian end users at least.

Wikipedia has remained one of the most popular 'go-to places on the web search pages' alike Google SearchEngine results. In fact, for umpteen search strings on Google Search, Wikipedia's entry is either the primary/highlighted one, or the top search result.

In recent times when someone is accessing Wikipedia for some topic or search result in India, an appeal to donate is flashing on the very first fold of the Page.

The appeal to donate used to flash for some point of time last year and few previous years too, but those appeals were "soft appeals for donation" unlike the current one, which is like a "real cryout for help towards survival (of the entity & its functioning)".

The wordings of the appeal sound like genuinely asking for monetary help. Any functioning entity, no matter if its a 'not-for-profit' or charity kinds, needs monetary support for its existence, functioning and day to day being there for use by its clientele. "No money, No existence" is the basic rule of any business model of an entity.

We, at #bricksNmortar, have been using the platform now & then to source information and get updated about know-hows. We have donated. How about you.. Will you??

But, to discuss the topic a bit more, our donation shall get accounted for as "another small drop in the ocean-- which is relatively small, but shall count in the overall picture. But, is it enough for a giant like Wikipedia to survive, and function for long?

Lets do a little number crunching based on certain wild guesses and assumptions...

Say, 1.35 crore (that is, 13.5 million people out of the total population of about 135 crore, that is, 1350 million people in India; which is like 1% of the total Indian populace) netizens in India actually donates an average of INR (₹) 150 per person.

So, average ₹150 per netizen x 13.5 million netizens = ₹202.5 crores (which is, roughly, US$27 million)

Point is-- Is US Twenty Seven million dollars (US$27 million) a big enough amount that can help sustain a bigwig like Wikipedia to manage its survival for long?? Although, this notionally estimated amount shall be a part of fundraising from other sources as well, but still, is it big enough corpus for an entity to run, especially when the entity is (almost) advertisement-free?

Well, we don't know the answer. 

May be, the corporate sponsorships/patronage from India, and from other sources around the world, shall all add up to a larger corpus, that shall help Wikipedia stay alive, and running.

But, in case the situation is really grim on finanial turf, the world might witness this source of free & abundate information & knowledgebase breathe its last in near future. 

Fingers shall stay crossed, with a prayer in our hearts, that Wikipedia survives. Moreover, then only it shall be able to improve many of its pages from the so-called leftist narrative hijacking too!

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