San Francisco - The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, announced on Wednesday that it has received an $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation, which will fund a project designed to make it easier for first-time users to contribute articles to the site.

"Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric," said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

"One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia."

The project, which will focus on hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don't need them, will run through 2009, with the resulting improvements to be made available as open source software.

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