User:Daniel Mayer/Sandbox

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Knowledge is power. Help make it free.

You may have noticed recent slowdowns, and periods of downtime, for Wikipedia and her sister sites. We are working to make our system more efficient, but traffic on the Wikimedia servers is doubling every four months. Wikipedia.org is already one of the top 200 most popular websites on the Internet and will likely be in the top 100 well before the end of the year.

This growth has been very exciting but has been a challenge to cope with. Just to keep up we will need to spend $55,000 on new hardware this quarter alone (compared to $30,000 last quarter). However, we want to do more: we want reserve capacity and an infrastructure for deploying server clusters around the world. Hosting partners could then help us share our exponentially increasing traffic load, reducing constant increases in our expenses.

To make this possible, we are using a grant from the Lounsbery Foundation to buy additional machines we would not normally purchase. But to do this, we need your assistance to cover the rest of our budget, such as hosting (another exponentially-growing expense), short-term hardware needs, and other foundation expenses.

In all, we will need $75,000 in donations to reach our goals this quarter. You helped us raise over $50,000 in our last fund drive. Every little bit helps - the vast majority of all donations we receive are $20 or less.

You have the power to help keep these free resources growing. Thank you for your generosity.

-- The Wikimedia Team