Wikipedia awarded €50K from Princess of Asturias Foundation

WIKIPEDIA, the online collaborative encyclopaedia, was awarded a €50,000 grant for international cooperation by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, a Spanish organisation with Princess Leonor as the honorary president.
According to the foundation, Wikipedia is an “important example of international, democratic, open and participatory cooperation – to which thousands of people of all nationalities contribute selflessly – that has managed to make universal knowledge available to everyone.”
Wikipedia features more than 35 million articles in 288 languages, which are contributed and edited by volunteers from around the world. The website, which receives approximately 500 million visits per month, has more than 25 million registered users.
The popularity of the website has led to several offshoots, all of which are based on the concept of free sharing of knowledge. A few examples include Wikibooks, a collection of open-source textbooks, manuals and instructional guides; Wikiversity, a free educational platform where users create learning projects and develop educational material; and Wikitravel, a user-created travel guide.
The €50,000 prize is the seventh of eight awards to be bestowed by the foundation this year. The award categories – which reward scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanitarian work at the international level – include the Arts, Literature, Social Sciences, Communication and Humanities, Technical and Scientific Research, International Cooperation, Concord and Sports.