Dear Wikipedia Readers:

This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee. We’re a small non-profit with costs of a top 5 website: servers, staff and programs.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park, a temple for the mind where we can all go to think and learn. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it a for profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here.

If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to make a tax-deductible donation to keep it online and ad-free another year.

Thank you.

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder