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The rest of the Internet used to be really cool.

I remember, in the mid-90’s, when anyone could publish whatever they wanted. There was so much diversity on the Internet then, it felt more like a community of interesting people. Now it’s basically glorified television.

I was part of the huge community of volunteers that created Wikipedia. We could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but we decided that sharing information and educating people is more important than making money.

Now I’m a programmer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia. We do need some money to keep the servers running and pay our small staff. Instead of having advertisers and financial influence skewing what we do, every year we simply ask readers to vote with their dollars to support a real community of people that represents something different on the Internet.

Please pitch in $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can to keep Wikipedia on the web and free of ads. When you contribute $10, it’s is multiplied many times over. Your donation helps pay a developer’s salary and we develop a tool that lets 1,000 volunteers do something great on Wikipedia.

Suddenly, your $10 has facilitated a lot more than it can at any other non-profit.

Your donation will help us improve Wikipedia and will make sure that at least this part of the Internet stays cool.

Thanks,

Ryan Kaldari

Wikipedia Programmer