First, the good news for Canonical and its loyal followers: Yes, Wikimedia Foundation (the company behind Wikipedia) is embracing Ubuntu on its servers in a big way.

"...The Wikimedia Foundation, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and Kaltura, Inc., a pioneer in Collaborative Media, announced today that the companies have begun a process aimed at bringing rich-media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki websites. Under this project, users will be invited to test new functionality that could one day enable Wikipedia articles to include collaboratively created video, audio, animations, and slideshows as well as text and images..."

"Every year, Wikipedia usage goes upward, and every year the technical folks working and volunteering with Wikimedia have to plan, purchase, and implement new servers to keep up to the growing popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects. With the advances in computing, running 9 new application servers this year took the load of 36 application servers from 3 years ago..."

"Last week the Wikimedia Foundation board took an important step toward giving Wikipedia the right to choose to migrate to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Credit goes to the Wikimedia Foundation and Free Software Foundation for having the wisdom and foresight to enable this progress. However, the real work has just begun..."

The Wikimedia Foundation has received another major donation. Today Google announced that it is donating two million dollars to the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia.

"Videos will soon be available on Wikipedia, and users will be able to compile their own mini-encyclopedias, says Florence Devouard, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation..."

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation responsible for the operation of the Wikipedia free online encyclopaedia, has received $500,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a foundation established by the co-founder of HP and his wife.

"Wikinews reporters interviewed Sue Gardner, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, the project that runs Wikipedia and several other projects, including Wikinews..."

Since the free, online Wikipedia user-created encyclopedia began in 2001, the Linux-based IT infrastructure behind it has been expanded and lassoed together to keep up with the demands of the popular Web site.