[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Wikipedia readers donated $25 million to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects. The Foundation completed its ninth annual fundraising campaign successfully, guaranteeing that the online encyclopedia will remain ad-free.

More than 1.2 million donors contributed to the 2012 campaign, which ran on English Wikipedia in 5 countries (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand) for only 9 full days, down from 46 days in 2011. The most-successful 24-hour period for donations this year brought in $2,365,564 million from 145,573 donors. Messages and formats optimized in this year’s campaign will be used in another fundraising drive for the rest of the world in April 2013.

In another development, the Wikimedia Foundation will conduct a thank you campaign for its volunteer editors with short videos that showcase some of the roughly 80,000 volunteer editors, photographers and free-knowledge advocates from around the world who regularly contribute to Wikimedia projects. The campaign starts on December 27th and will run through the end of the year.