Wikimedia Foundation to introduce paid editing.

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CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, St. Petersburg, Florida (UNN) — The Wikimedia Foundation®, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia®, the Free Cheap Encyclopedia™, will be introducing paid editing to all projects through the new Virgin Wikimedia® Corporation joint venture with Richard Branson.

A standard paid account will start at US$25 (€20 or £0.05) per month per user, with a discount of US$5 (€16 or £0.04) per month for users with over 2000 edits. The paid editing initiative was announced during the Foundation's Winter 2006/Q4 funding drive.

Wikipedia® is the number 10 website in the world, and the only website in the Alexa Top 20 run by a nonprofit. Despite its low overheads, with only six paid staff, the Foundation has had tremendous difficulty in keeping up with the ever-increasing demand for server hardware, not to mention the bandwidth bill for serving an average 150 megabytes per second, doubling every six months. Slow page loading and frequent downtime remain perennial problems.

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