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Monday, February 4, 2013

A Million Generous Donations

Thanks to more than a million generous donations, our annual fundraiser was over in record time. We said thank you on Wikipedia at the end of 2012. In case you missed that, we're saying it again here.
Your donation makes it possible for the Wikimedia Foundation to provide thousands of volunteer editors with the tools and infrastructure they need to keep Wikipedia going -- software developers, a data center fit to serve the world's fifth most popular site, support programs around the world and more.
Have you ever wondered who wrote the millions of articles on Wikipedia? This year we made a video to introduce you to just a few of them. If you have a few minutes, please watch:
http://youtu.be/3Knv6D6Thi0
(Note: Video hosted by YouTube, not Wikimedia, and is subject to YouTube's terms of use and privacy policy.)
We also convinced a pair of independent filmmakers to donate this clip from their upcoming documentary film showing a remote village in Peru where children learn to edit Wikipedia and add an article about their own community:
http://youtu.be/1XPnH_rF9ks
(Also hosted by YouTube)
The 2012 fundraiser was our shortest and most successful ever. Thanks to our readers, we've been able to spend less time asking for donations each year even as rising readership and new challenges -- such as the rise of mobile -- increase our expenses.
In 2013 we're going to experiment with a significant change in the way we fundraise. We're going to try showing our readers fundraising messages one or a few times outside of our annual fundraiser. This will allow us to receive donations from a broader population of readers (rather than only those who happen to visit during the end-of-year fundraising days) while showing far fewer messages to users overall. We're not sure how this will work. Please let us know if you feel you are seeing our fundraising messages repeatedly before December. Our goal is to show our readers as few fundraising messages as possible, but for everyone to see them at least once.
If you have any feedback -- positive or negative -- about our fundraiser please reply to this email or send a message to: donate@wikimedia.org
Once again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting what we believe is the most important and beautiful site on the web, and a community of volunteers who we love and respect.
Sincerely,
The Wikimedia Fundraising Team

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