Template:2011FR/appeal-DrJames-1028/en

Chances are your doctor reads Wikipedia. When I first started medical school in 1999, Wikipedia didn’t exist. Now, nearly 75% of physicians say they use Wikipedia in their practice. Can you imagine how many patients have been helped by Wikipedia? It must be thousands, maybe millions of people. I even had a patient hand me an article that I wrote! Wikipedia started as a fascinating concept, but now it’s a powerful resource serving billions of articles to hundreds of millions of people all over the world -- and it’s all paid for by small donations from readers like you.

Will you pitch in $5, $10 $20 or whatever you can to keep Wikipedia running, free to use and free of ads?

Just like the academics who write articles for medical journals, Wikipedia contributors research and write articles because they’re passionate and curious. Wikipedia operates on a fraction of the other top-5 websites’ resources. Google might have one million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. Wikipedia has 400 servers and 73 staff.

It is the #5 site on the web and serves 422 million different people every month – with billions of page views. Wikipedia is what the world is reading. But there’s a lot that still needs to be improved. I hope you’ll be a part of making it even better. This doctor, at least, recommends it. Thanks,

James Heilman Wikipedia Editor