ReadWriteWeb

The Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's philanthropic and investment organization, announced today that it will give the Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Wikipedia, a $2 million grant over the next two years.

At current spending levels, Omidyar will be contributing just over 10% of WIkipedia's full expenses. The Foundation has been concerned about the global economic climate's impact on donations and is about to enter into a major new period of its history in which the free-form editing of Wikipedia will be slowed by a new approval process that has long been expected.

The Wikimedia Foundation just emailed ReadWriteWeb to announce receipt of $500,000 in grant funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The grant is a part of a $100 million dollar program to fund open education resources, and given Wikimedia's mission to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, the Hewlett Foundation couldn't have chosen a better org.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed that the copyright licensing terms on its wikis be changed to include a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in addition to its longstanding GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The proposal was approved by a 75 percent majority of community voters as announced this week.

The change will apply to all text and multimedia content, including video, images, and audio now licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later versions and will increase "the compatibility and availability of free content," according to the WMF site.

The Creative Commons Blog today announced that the Wikipedia community is holding a vote to move to using Creative Commons for its primary content license. The license being discussed is CC BY-SA or Attribution-ShareAlike. Although Wikipedia is already covered by the Gnu Free Documentation License (or GFDL), which is similar (and was the best available choice at the time Wikipedia got started), it contains some 'potentially onerous provisions' according to the Wikimedia Licensing Update page.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the immensely popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia, just announced that it has reached its fundraising goal for 2008, which will allow the foundation to cover its operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009. Overall, a total of 125,000 donors gave over $6.2 million during 2008, though in December alone, after a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, 50,000 individuals contributed more than $2 million.