Musings from an overworked translator

Support Wikipedia November 26, 2008

I donated to the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, today. I found out about their annual campaign while researching the site for some highly specific military jargon. Of course Wikipedia had the answers. A donation to Wikipedia’s annual campaign will help the Wikimedia Foundation sustain Wikipedia and deliver new and innovative global programs to improve its quality, reach, and levels of participation.

If you use Wikipedia as a resource (I have used both the German and English versions and expect you have too), I encourage you to donate to their annual campaign. Folks have donated anything from one dollar up to an anonymous gift of $250,000. Wikimedia is funded primarily through donations by tens of thousands of individuals, but also through several grants and gifts of servers and hosting. The Wikimedia Foundation receives donations from more than 50 countries around the world. Though individual donations are relatively small, the sheer numbers ensure their success.

As Wikipedia explains:

The job of the Wikimedia Foundation is to provide easy access to information, for people all over the world – free of charge, and free of advertising. As a non-profit, it is dependent on your help to do that. Your donations directly support some of the most popular collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world’s top ten most popular websites and the largest encyclopedia ever compiled in human history. We are hoping to raise $6 million through our annual campaign.

So help keep Wikipedia and the Foundation’s other projects online, free of charge and free of advertising by digging into your pockets and giving a little back to a very valuable resource. Sure, sometimes their articles contain questionable or biased information (since everyone can contribute articles or information, that isn’t all that surprising), but most of their information is worth its weight in gold. Oh, and don’t bother looking for me in the Benefactors page. I donated anonymously.