Template:2010/JimmyLetterD/en

It wasn’t fair.

It truly wasn’t fair that until ten years ago, 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 didn’t ever think Wikipedia would get this big - 17 million articles in 270 languages. And we certainly never dared to hope that it would become the fifth most visited website on the Internet.

I’m a volunteer - just another one of the 80,000 people who work on Wikipedia each month - and I’m not making any money from this project. But there are still bills to pay - we need to pay for servers, for bandwidth, for education programs, and provide for our very small staff. So every year at this time, we ask our friends all over the world to chip in $20, $35, $50, or whatever they can afford to help us. Will you join in this effort this year with your contribution? Every penny that you give us goes back into keeping the websites up, free, and available to the world.

It’s about making sure that knowledge is free. And it should be available to anyone who needs it.

Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia Founder