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From Wikipedia researcher Maryana Pinchuk A year ago I left Harvard, an educational institution with 300 endowed chairs, for a summer job at Wikipedia -- and they didn’t have any chairs. They had just rented a second floor, after adding their 45th employee. But the chairs hadn’t arrived. They were hunched at wobbly folding tables. Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff. Wikipedia is the #5 website in the world, and it runs on the change that people scrape from their couches. Please pitch in -- $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can. Every cent you give will go right back to our community, for technology, legal assistance, or outreach. At Harvard, I was working on a PhD so that I could go on to be a professor at a big university. But I couldn’t leave Wikipedia, because every day I was inspired by the passion and curiosity of the people here who don’t want to keep knowledge shelved in a library or a university, but want to put it out there for everybody on the planet to use. On Wikipedia, there’s not a single advertisement -- and there never will be -- because that could bias the information in our articles. We’re able to keep it ad-free thanks to the one or two out of every thousand readers who donate. We need a few more today. With your small donation we can keep the content free, unadulterated, uncommercialized and on the web forever. Thanks, Maryana Pinchuk Wikipedia Researcher PS: I eventually did get a chair.

Please make a donation $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.

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