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A year ago I left Harvard, an educational institution with 300 endowed chairs, for a summer job at Wikipedia -- and they didn’t have any chairs.

They had just rented a second floor, after adding their 45th employee. But the chairs hadn’t arrived. They were hunched at wobbly folding tables.

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.

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

Please pitch in -- $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can. Every cent you give will go right back to our community, for technology, legal assistance, or outreach.

At Harvard, I was working on a PhD so that I could go on to be a professor at a big university. But I couldn’t leave Wikipedia, because every day I was inspired by the passion and curiosity of the people here 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.

On Wikipedia, there’s not a single advertisement -- and there never will be -- because that could bias the information in our articles. We’re able to keep it ad-free thanks to the one or two out of every thousand readers who donate. We need a few more today. With your small donation we can keep the content free, unadulterated, uncommercialized and on the web forever.

Thanks,

Maryana Pinchuk

Researcher, Wikimedia Foundation

PS: I eventually did get a chair.