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Wikipedia is like a public utility. We’re piping the sum of all human knowledge to you whenever and wherever you need it -- and we’re doing it for free.

Wikipedia is a place of learning, free from ads, and written entirely by volunteers who love knowledge and want every person on the planet to have access to all of it. The only problem with this Utopian scheme is that it costs money for servers, bandwidth and a bare bones staff.

Each year we tell our readers about this problem, and each year they’ve made it go away. I edited Wikipedia as a volunteer for five years before joining the staff and I’ve watched this work over and over. I have gained so much respect for our readers. No users of any other website do this. Please be a part of it this year by donating $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can afford.

Wikipedia is the knowledge utility that you get for free -- but it’s only free because a few out of every thousand readers voluntarily pitch in to pay for the pipes.

People who want to edit an encyclopedia for fun are pretty rare. And people who want to pay to keep it on the web when they don’t have to are rarer still. Please join me by making your donation now.

Thanks,

Steven Walling Wikipedia Author