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From a Wikipedia contributor I'm a university student. Textbooks for one semester cost me $500. On Wikipedia, I get thousands of books' worth of information for free. That’s why I don’t just read Wikipedia, I help create it. It’s really important to me to keep this resource available to everyone, free of charge. With 470 million readers per month, Wikipedia is important to many people all over the world. Wikipedia should have fallen to pieces long ago. It is consensus-driven, unlike just about any other community. There’s no real overarching administration, no board of executives determining every edit and every policy. Instead, a great community of volunteers work together to create this source of knowledge, free to use and free of ads. Working that way, our community of millions of editors works together to create encyclopedias in 283 languages, containing a combined total of over 20 million articles. We do this on a tiny budget compared to other top websites. For us to do our work, we need a stable infrastructure: servers, bandwidth, programmers, and even lawyers to protect our independence. It’s all funded by donations from Wikipedia readers. You might think a few dollars is just a drop in the bucket, but it’s actually what makes this whole operation possible. Thanks so much.

Select your gift amount: $10 $20 $25 $35 $50 $100 $250 Other: Why your donation is needed: Wikipedia is non-profit, but it's the #5 website in the world -- serving 470 million people every month with billions of page views. We work hard to keep our operation lean. Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff. We will never run ads. Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong in Wikipedia. If everyone reading this made a small donation, we would only have to fundraise for a few hours. Not everyone can or will donate, but each year just enough people decide to give. We only raise what we need. When we've raised our budget, we stop fundraising for the year. This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

By donating, you are sharing your information with the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and its service providers in the U.S. and elsewhere pursuant to our donor privacy policy. We do not sell or trade your information to anyone. For more information, please read our donor policy. Make a monthly donation Other ways to give Frequently asked questions Tax deductibility information