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Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 420 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

If everyone reading this donated $5, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales Wikipedia Founder