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In 2001, I had a crazy idea: get people around the world – in their spare time – to build a free online encyclopedia.

Ten years later, a vast community of volunteers has written more than 17 million articles in 270 languages, and Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website in the world.

We’ve faced many challenges along the way, but we’ve always emerged stronger by staying true to our original vision – and working incredibly hard.

Right now, we’re facing a new challenge.

We’re finally building the kind of advanced data center that we need for a website our size and hiring long-overdue staff to support our thousands of volunteers. These are obvious things we must do, and we’ve grown so big so fast that our need is now urgent.

Every year around this time we ask people who use Wikipedia to pitch in a little to keep it free. This year we need to ask for more: $16 million. It’s going to be hard to reach this goal.

But we have to. We decided long ago to keep Wikipedia completely free – free to use, free of advertising and free from anyone’s agenda. We’re going to stick to that commitment.

Please help us do that with a donation of $20, $35, $50 or whatever you can.

All the best,

Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia Founder