Template:2011FR/appeal-maryana-0930-2/en

If you’re really passionate about knowledge, you don’t have to go to a place like Harvard. You can just go to Wikipedia.

Before I joined Wikipedia I was at Harvard grad school, and I guess I assumed that Wikipedia was made by some committee who write fancy articles for profit. But it’s not. It’s created by volunteers who are sacrificing their time because they’re committed to sharing knowledge and making sure it’s available to everyone in the world.

The information is free for everyone, but it does cost money to run the 5th most visited website on the Internet. Compared to the other top-5 websites, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, is pretty bare-bones:


 * Google: 1,000,000 servers, 24,000 employees.
 * Facebook: 60,000 servers, 2,000 employees.
 * Microsoft: 220,000 servers, 90,000 employees.
 * Yahoo: 50,000 servers, 13,900 employees.
 * Wikipedia: 370 servers, 73 employees.

And we serve Wikipedia to 420 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

We run on a shoestring. I mean, about a year ago we got a second floor and hunched at folding tables until the chairs came. Every cent that we get goes right back to our users -- whether it’s paying for bandwidth or programmers to improve our technology and make the site easier to use, or just keeping the servers running.

On Wikipedia, there’s not a single advertisement biasing the information in our articles. We’re able to keep it ad-free because every year a few out of every thousand readers pitch in to help. With the change you scrape from your couch cushions, we can keep the content free, unadulterated and uncommercialized.

I always thought I would go on to become a professor at a big university. But I decided to stay at Wikipedia, because every day I’m inspired by the passion and curiosity of the people who don’t want to keep knowledge shelved in a library or a university, but want to put it out there for everybody on the planet to use, free of charge.

Will you donate $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can to help keep it that way?

Thanks,

Maryana Pinchuk

Wikimedia Foundation Staffer