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Wikipedia is a utility. It’s like getting lights and water to your house. We’re piping the sum of human knowledge to you whenever you need it -- and we’re doing it for free.

Wikipedia is a place of learning, free from ads, written entirely by volunteers who do this work because they love knowledge and want every person on the planet to have access to all of it.

The only problem with this utopian scheme is that it costs money for servers and bandwidth — and the bare bones staff who run the infrastructure and keep Wikipedia from getting sued off the Internet.

Each year we tell our readers about this problem, and each year they’ve made it go away. I’ve edited Wikipedia as a volunteer for five years now, and I’ve watched this work over and over. I have gained so much respect for our readers. No users of any other website do this. Please be a part of it this year by donating $10, $20, $35 or whatever you can afford.

It’s okay to think small.

You don’t have to be thinking about some grandiose plan to do something great. You just take a few little actions piece by piece and put them together and suddenly you’ve got the world’s biggest encyclopedia.

That’s how it happened with us on the wiki. Anyone can make a contribution to Wikipedia. Even a little action—like correcting a comma, donating a few dollars, or sharing something you learned on Wikipedia with someone else—those all come from the same motivation of making knowledge free to all.

With billions of page views every week, we could bring in billions of dollars in profit by advertising like the other top websites, but that doesn’t belong here. Wikipedia is something special, and we have to keep it free from ads and free from any kind of influence.

Please help this year.

Thanks,

Steven Walling

Staffer, Wikimedia Foundation