Danish users of Wikipedia site donate individual sums amounting 200,000 kroner to keep the website going

An analysis by the online free encyclopaedia Wikipedia has shown that Danish users have donated 200,000 kroner to the project since last summer.

The website has been publishing hundreds of thousands of free user-generated articles since 2001 and for the last six years has been running annual fundraisers to keep the website going in its present independent form.

More than 1070 Danes donated to the fund last year, with an average donation of 186 kroner, reports DR News.

Niels Mølbjerg Lund Pedersen, a part time associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, has written extensively on the Wikipedia phenomenon and said the results showed people were willing to pay for something that they could get for free.

He added that while 200,000 kroner is a long way off from the millions raised for Haiti, it is still a healthy result for the website project.

‘Of course it’s easier to collect for a pressing humanitarian project than it is to collect for Wikipedia, which is built more on the hippie ideal of knowledge sharing between people,’ Pedersen told DR.