A Letter From Wikipedia

Well?! Who among of you today don’t know Wikipedia yet? I doubt it if someone will claim that he or she did not even recognize it or know it. I know that all of you are familiar with this online free encyclopedia, which contains a lot of different information around the world. It might contain information about an artist, a singer, a planet, a place, an event, etc. Mostly when we do our assignment or do some research, we usually land on this site. Indeed, it became popular that it also became a part of our lifestyle.

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 25 million articles, over 4.1 million in the English Wikipedia alone, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,and it has about 100,000 active contributors. As of February 2013, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.

I know you’re wondering on what’s the purpose of this post, well, as I’m doing some research, the results land on Wikipedia site as usual, then I just noticed some sort of letter on its header portion that goes like this:

Dear Wikipedia readers: We are the small non-profit that runs the #5 website in the world. We have only 150 staff but serve 450 million users, and have costs like any other top site: servers, power, rent, programs, and staff. 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 run on donations averaging about ₱200. If everyone reading this gave ₱200, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online another year. Please help us forget fundraising and get back to Wikipedia. Thank you.

You can view the actual screenshot below

click image to enlarge

Actually, I was kind of shocked about the total staff they have, knowing that it serve millions of users around the globe, and for me, it feels like they don’t have that enough manpower to run this kind of system. But here they are, STILL providing us with the information’s we need, and indeed, as what they have mentioned in the letter, it is like a library, a public park, a temple for the mind and a place we can all go to think and learn.

It would be a lost, if this kind of site will be dissolved or be gone. A site that only offers information to feed our mind. If you are able to donate, then just visit the link below

DONATIONS HERE


Disclaimer:
I’m not doing this to promote Wikipedia or alike, just wanted this kind of resources to remain alive. That’s all nothing less, nothing more. : )


Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia