Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Use wikipedia much? Then this is for you, dearies.



If you go to Wikipedia page today or any other day, and notice a header seeking for donation, I do urge you to give something...even as low as RM10. Surely most of us can afford RM10, right?

Compared to how much Wikipedia has assisted us in our search for all sorts of information, trivial and otherwise...how many times have we wiki-ed for information, those times when we heard of something for the first time and needed more details, when somebody asked you something and you knew it once but may have forgotten, those tip-of-the-tongue moments, and so forth.

I would say RM10 is in fact, too little.

So, why should we donate to Wikipedia if after all, we google for information all the time, and Google is free, right? (Google make tons of money from advertising btw, wikipedia has no ads).

And we already paid for our whatever-speed-it-is internet!

Well, read below, which are the words of Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Your donation covers not only your own costs of using Wikipedia, but also the costs of other Wikipedia readers.

Like the retired farmer in upstate New York who's using Wikipedia to study the science of sludge, and the student in Kuala Lumpur who's researching organic chemistry.  The British mechanic who, after he broke his back in an accident, used Wikipedia to retrain himself as a web developer.  The civil servant in Finland who set up an offline version of Wikipedia for a small school in Ghana. And the father in Mexico City who takes his little daughters to the museum on weekends, and uses Wikipedia to help them understand everything they're seeing there. 
Wikipedia's job is to bring the sum total of all human knowledge to everyone around the world in their own language. That's a pretty audacious mission, but with 30 million articles and 287 languages, I'd say that thanks to you and people like you, we are getting there. The fact that you are helping to pay the costs of running Wikipedia means it can stay ad-free and independent of bias, focused solely on helping its readers.   
Exactly as it should be.

So would you like to give back ? Click below :)



p/s - Yes, I'm starting to blog here again. Whee!

No comments: