Template:2011FR/appeal-sarah/en

Ads don’t belong in an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is an incredibly powerful tool built by a group of really passionate people who love to help bring information to the world. Anyone can use Wikipedia. It doesn’t matter where you live, what you look like, your language, or religious beliefs. And that’s such a revolutionary thing.

But if Wikipedia didn’t get lots of small donations from its users every year, it would disappear. Unlike the rest of the Internet, Wikipedia is not plastered with annoying flashing advertisements. We are not here to be biased, we’re not here to sell anything. We just put neutral information out there for the taking, and donations from readers allow that information to be shared with the world.

So I’m asking you to donate $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can to keep Wikipedia free, keep it ad-free, and to support all the great work that people are doing with it around the world.

For Wikipedia, these small donations really add up. I’m a student, and I can only really afford a $5 donation a month. Someday it’ll go up. But in the meantime, every single little bit makes a difference.

What’s especially impressive is that my five little dollars help people all over the world access this free resource. The infrastructure that supports our work, hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, is about as bare-bones as it gets. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, running with only 370 servers and fewer than 100 employees. That’s really astounding.

Compare that to our fellow top-5 global websites:
 * Google: 1,000,000 servers, 24,000 employees.
 * Facebook: 60,000 servers, 2,000 employees.
 * Microsoft: 220,000 servers, 90,000 employees.
 * Yahoo: 50,000 servers, 13,900 employees.

When I add an article, I’m helping build a legacy to share with the world -- someone, somewhere is really going to utilize that information. And when you pitch in a few dollars, you can do the exact same thing.

Thanks,

Sarah Stierch

Wikipedia Author