Dear Reader,
Today I am going to ask you to support Wikipedia with a donation. This might sound unusual: Why does one of the world’s five most popular web properties ask for financial support from its users?
Wikipedia is built differently from almost every other top 50 website. We have a small number of paid staff, just twenty-three. Wikipedia content is free to use by anyone for any purpose. Our annual expenses are less than six million dollars. Wikipedia is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded in 2003.
At its core, Wikipedia is driven by a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers – all dedicated to sharing knowledge freely. Over almost eight years, these volunteers have contributed more than 11 million articles in 265 languages. More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information, free of charge and free of advertising.
But Wikipedia is more than a website. We share a common cause: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s our commitment.
Your donation helps us in several ways. Most importantly, you will help us cover the increasing cost of managing global traffic to one of the most popular websites on the Internet. Funds also help us improve the software that runs Wikipedia — making it easier to search, easier to read, and easier to write for. We are committed to growing the free knowledge movement world-wide, by recruiting new volunteers, and building strategic partnerships with institutions of culture and learning.
Wikipedia is different. It’s the largest encyclopedia in history, written by volunteers. Like a national park or a school, we don’t believe advertising should have a place in Wikipedia. We want to keep it free and strong, but we need the support of thousands of people like you.
I invite you to join us: Your donation will help keep Wikipedia free for the whole world.
Thank you,
Jimmy Wales
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