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I don't get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia.

Neither do our thousands of other volunteer authors and editors. When we started Wikipedia, we could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but we decided to do something different.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

Because Wikipedia is something special. It’s like a library or a public park. It’s a place we go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. But it’s also a unique human project, the first of its kind in history.

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.

And yet we're a small organization. I've worked hard over the years to keep us lean. But there are still bills to pay: servers, bandwidth, and our very small staff.

So every year at this time, we ask those who use Wikipedia to protect and sustain this shared resource with a donation of $20, $35, $50 -- or whatever you can afford.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia Founder