Template:2011FR/appeal-susan-US4-1104/en

Thanks to Wikipedia, nerds like me get to share their weird passions with the world.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been a total nerd about gastropods – slimy little creatures like the land snails you find in your garden. They’re my passion, but I’m guessing they aren’t yours. :)

The magic of Wikipedia is that it combines the weird passions of people around the world to create an impossibly thorough resource that anyone can access. It’s all powered by this unspoken light inside all of us that comes from the desire to help educate, to help share knowledge.

And if you stop and think for even a second, you realize how fabulous it is to get all of this information for free -- without having to wade through mountains of ads. It’s like the voice of sanity in a crazy, consumerist world. It’s almost impossible to believe that Wikipedia could exist on only these tiny little donations. Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. Wikipedia only has 400 servers and 73 staff, but it is the #5 site on the web and serves 454 million different people every month.

If you benefit from Wikipedia, you have a sort of moral obligation to kick in at least a small amount of cash to support it.

How about pitching in $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can today to protect and sustain Wikipedia? Thanks,

Susan Hewitt

Wikipedia Author