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Wikipedia is like a public utility. We’re piping the sum of all human knowledge to you whenever and wherever you need it -- and we’re doing it for free.

Wikipedia is a place of learning, free from ads, and written entirely by volunteers who 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, bandwidth and a bare bones staff.

Each year we tell our readers about this problem, and each year they’ve made it go away. I’ve edited Wikipedia 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 $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can afford.

Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 422 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

Wikipedia is the knowledge utility that you get for free -- but it’s only free because a few out of every thousand readers voluntarily pitch in to pay for the pipes.

People who want to edit an encyclopedia for fun are pretty rare. And people who want to pay to keep it on the web when they don’t have to are rarer still. Please join me by making your donation now.

Thanks,

Steven Walling Wikipedia Researcher