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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.

Google has one million servers. Yahoo has 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff. Wikipedia is the #5 website in the world, and it runs on the change that people scrape from their couches.

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.