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My name is Kartika, I live in Indonesia, and I'm one of Wikipedia's 100,000 active editors.

All of Wikipedia's 12 million articles are written by volunteers like me. Most people can't believe it's possible. Community is what makes it work. As someone who uses Wikipedia, you are part of our community, and today I'm writing to ask you to support and protect Wikipedia.

We "Wikipedians" work collaboratively, sometimes with many people improving one article at the same time. We follow some core principles to maintain high quality and a neutral point of view – but also principles such as "Assume good faith" and "Don't bite the newbies" that keep our community open and growing.

Each year, many of us gather in a different city to talk about the health of Wikipedia and its sister projects such as Wiktionary and Commons. This year we chose Gdansk, Poland. I'm a relatively new editor, but I was able to attend thanks to a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the U.S. organization that runs Wikipedia's servers.

Wikipedia is created for free by volunteers. It is made for free for the whole world. But it costs a little money to run hundreds of servers and pay the Wikimedia Foundation's barebones staff.

Wikipedia began 10 years ago with just a few articles. Today it is the world's fifth most visited website. One third of all people with internet access in the world use it every month.

This is our annual fundraising drive, when we ask everyone who values Wikipedia to contribute $20, $35, $50 or whatever you can to keep Wikipedia free.

Thank you,

Kartika,

Jakarta, Indonesia