Template:2010/JimmyLetterJ/en

It wasn’t fair.

It truly wasn’t fair that it cost thousands of dollars to own a set of encyclopedias. It wasn’t fair that the information locked in textbooks and expensive scientific journals was out of reach to most of the world.

And because it wasn’t fair, some of us got together ten years ago to create Wikipedia. Our vision was a world in which every single human being could freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

We never thought Wikipedia would get this big: 17 million articles in 270 languages. We certainly never dared to hope it would become the fifth most visited website in the world.

I'm a volunteer. I don't get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia, and neither do our thousands and thousands of volunteer writers and editors.

But there are still bills to pay: for servers, for bandwidth, and for our very small staff. So every year at this time, we ask people who use Wikipedia to chip in to keep it free.

Please make a donation of $20, $35, $50 or whatever you can afford.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia Founder