Wikipedia: A brief ramble on why you should donate to keep it free

by **PhilipB** 1/2/2011, 3:51 pm

I'm sure that all of us have used Wikipedia at least once in our lives. For me, ever since I discovered it through Answers.com four years ago, it has been an indispensable tool that I use almost daily to help me with my study, to answer something in my mind that has been boggling me, or to just browse and find out interesting (referenced of course!) information that I will take with me in the future when taking a test, partaking in a quiz, or just generally having a discussion about a particular subject.

And the price of all this information? Since 2001, free. This information is free. What's the catch? There isn't one. No advertising, no subscription, no having to register, no being blocked if you have AdBlock, none of it. A free portal of information on millions of subjects. I'm sure that if you think of a subject now and type it into Wikipedia, it'll be there. And if it isn't, you can start up a new article and add information referenced from other websites, or your own general knowledge. Then you can ask other Wikipedia users to add their information to it, or just leave it be and let other people add to it in their own time. Now when somebody else looks up the same subject, they'll be able to read your information. You've just helped somebody find out something interesting and relevant! And what was the cost of that? Nothing. Zilch.

Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites, like Wiktionary - the free online dictionary, rely on the community of the world wide web to contribute and add to articles to make them better, bigger, and more helpful to everyday people. You may contribute to Wikipedia, as I do, from time to time, or you might not and just read the articles like most. Whatever you do with Wikipedia, you should donate to the Wikimedia Foundation. You should do this for several reasons which I am going to summarise into bullet points to save you time, but which you can find out extended information by going to the Wikimedia websites.

You're helping keep Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites free to use. Without the small donations of everyday people like you, Wikipedia would not be here today. And if donations stopped, you can be sure that Wikipedia would have to resort to banner ads or, more likely, be shut down due to lack of funding. I'm sure many of us don't want to do that.
It helps keep freedom of speech. People who have been denied access to news and information on attacks inside their own country have relied on Wikinews and Wikipedia to help them find out and understand what is going on, and let them communicate their opinions.
You're letting more funds being put into the time and care of Wikipedia. Sites on the web don't stay still, as we've seen with Facebook and Twitter. However you may not know that whilst over $30 million is put into the development of Twitter, only $5 million is put into the development of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is the fifth-most popular website on the whole of the world wide web, compared to Twitter at the seventh-most.
That book report you did was probably done with the help of Wikipedia. Without Wikipedia, where would you go to find out what the League of Nations did? Or find simplified articles on Science from the Simple English Wikipedia? You'd have to rely on big, out-of-date, heavy textbooks from the library. Your instant source of up-to-the-minute information would be gone.

I hope that has convinced you to donate to Wikipedia. It's why I donated to Wikipedia. I gave £5. Even the least amount of money can help. If everybody reading the Wikipedia banner ads online at the moment asking for donations gave $5, the campaign would be over in a matter of days, or even hours.

So, please, donate whatever you can, big or small, to Wikimedia today. Oh, and thanks for reading. Wink