Please read: A personal appeal from
 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales


Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 454 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

If everyone reading this donated $5, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Where your donation goes
Technology: Servers, bandwidth, maintenance, development. Wikipedia is the #5 website in the world, and it runs on a fraction of what other top websites spend.
People: The other top 10 websites have thousands of employees. We have fewer than 100 employees, making your donation a great investment in a highly-efficient not-for-profit organization.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales
 Wikipedia Founder

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