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Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

Compared to the other top-5 websites, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, is pretty bare-bones:

• Google: 1,000,000 servers, 24,000 employees.
• Facebook: 60,000 servers, 2,000 employees.
• Microsoft: 220,000 servers, 90,000 employees.
• Yahoo: 50,000 servers, 13,900 employees.
• Wikipedia: 370 servers, 73 employees.

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 420 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

If everyone reading this donated $5, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder