Yesterday I received an email from Wikipedia’s founder that, in part, said this:
We are the small non-profit that runs the #5 website in the world. We have only 175 staff but serve 500 million users, and have costs like any other top site: servers, power, programs, and people.
Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind, a place we can all go to think and learn.
To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads. We take no government funds. We survive on donations from our readers. Now is the time we ask.
Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder
I love Wikipedia. Reading is my favorite way to take in information, so even when I take a break from ebooks and watch a movie, I immediately go to Wikipedia to research the movie I just watched. I want to find out how it was produced, received, distributed and what else the actors have been in. I can lose myself in Wikipedia by clicking on the link to the novel of the movie and from there on the link to the historical incident it was based on, etc. Or I’ll get stuck looking up the terrible 1980s sitcom an actor did, which it takes me way too long to tear myself away from.
I rarely watch more than one movie in a day.
But if you use Wikipedia, you know the hundreds of ways it’s been useful to you. Come on, cough up five bucks (US$5). I did.