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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 like me because we 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’ve edited Wikipedia as a volunteer for five years now, 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, $10, $20 or whatever you can afford.

The infrastructure that supports our work, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, is about as barebones as it gets. Wikipedia serves 411 million people per month with 370 servers and 73 employees. Now think of the other top-5 websites:


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

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