Fundraising banners/December 2014

Proposed text for fundraising banners.

Deployed as of 2014-12-04

DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS:

You’re probably busy, so we’ll get right to it. This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee. We’re a small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park, a temple for the mind where we can all go to think and learn. When we founded Wikipedia, we could have made it a for-profit company with advertising banners, but we decided to do something different. Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year.

Thank you.

Proposal 1

Dear reader:
Thank you for reading Wikipedia today. Fortunately the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that runs Wikipedia, is still financially healthy. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. To stay that way, we survive on donations averaging about $15. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. That’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee. We’re a small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is a place where we can all go to think and learn. When we founded Wikipedia, we could have made it a for-profit company with advertising banners, but we decided to do something different. Commerce is fine. But it doesn’t belong here. If Wikipedia is useful to you, and if you value our independence from advertisers, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year.

Thank you.

Proposal 2

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Proposal 3

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