I share a note I received from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder.
Please help him if you can.
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Dear Luca,
Thank you for your donation to this year’s fundraiser. We’re a little more than half-way toward our 2010 goal, so I hope you won’t mind if I ask you to help again.
Most people don’t know this, but I’m a volunteer.
I don’t get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia, and neither do our thousands of other volunteer authors and editors. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising, but I decided to do something different.
Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.
To keep Wikipedia ad-free, we ask for donations every year on the site. We’re sending you this email because we are scaling up our infrastructure this year, and we’re simply not able to raise the whole budget from the banners alone.
We have an easy way to make an automatic monthly donation to Wikipedia, and we’re looking for people who would like to become sustainers. (Of course you can make a one-time donation as well.)
Please make a monthly recurring gift of $2, $5, $7 — or whatever you can:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFRE021/en
Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. It is a unique human project, the first of its kind in history. It is a humanitarian project to bring a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
Every single person.
If all of Wikipedia’s 400 million users would donate $1 each, we would have 20 times the amount of money we need. We’re a small organization, and I’ve worked hard over the years to keep us lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.
To do this without resorting to advertising, we need you. It is you who keep this dream alive. It is you who have created Wikipedia. It is you who believe that a place of calm reflection and learning is worth having.
This year, please consider making a sustaining monthly donation of whatever amount you like to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder
P.S. — If you can’t commit to a recurring monthly donation, I hope you’ll consider making another one time gift to help us reach our goal before the end of the year. Please make your donation today.
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Wikimedia Foundation
P.O. Box 894879
Los Angeles, California 90189-4879
United States
If you do not wish to receive any future emails from the Wikimedia Foundation, please click here to unsubscribe.
Travels and more from a European family 
Thanks Gregory, obviously as a former Wikipedia editor you have an insider knowledge. Will try and document myself, although as an average user I cannot get a degree on every tool I use or study books on every cause I support. I try to be selective though, based on limited knowledge. You have to assume that for every $ you give to charity, a part ends up in the drain. I don’t see an easy solution, since neither stop giving or reaching a point where you are 100% comfortable with a cause and its background seems to be advisable.
People like you need to wake up to the fact that you’re being scammed.
I wonder when the news media will figure out that the Wikimedia Foundation spends on program services only 41 cents of every dollar they scam from donors, which earns them ONE STAR (out of four!) from Charity Navigator in organizational efficiency. In fact, their KPMG audit discovered that it only takes about $2.5 million to keep the servers running, provide ample bandwidth, and staff a team of code developers to keep things running smoothly. Why, then, is the ask for $20 million?
I also wonder why the news media never thought to cover the 2009 story of how the Wikimedia Foundation needed extra office space, and as if by magic, they hand-picked Jimmy Wales’ for-profit corporation to be their landlord, THEN obtained competitive bids, THEN asked Wales’ for-profit company to match the average of the competitive bids.
I too wonder why the media don’t seem to care that the 2010 market research study of past Wikimedia Foundation donors was awarded to the former employer of the WMF staffer running the project, without any competitive bidding whatsoever. And when the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation was asked how much the project cost, the guy asking the question was banned from the online discussion.