Subscribing to Wikipedia

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

When you think about how many sites around the web are entirely powered off the back of advertising rather than direct money, it’s kind of astonishing something as frequently and widely used as Wikipedia runs without any advertising and serves up dynamic pages as quickly as you can imagine. There’s media and text and an ever-growing reference and resource that has proven invaluable over the years.

Think about how many times a day you use Wikipedia – whether it is because you’re a student and it’s the world’s best secondary source, or whether you want to check up a fact, or whether you’ve just gone to look up one thing and found yourself taking a wiki-walk to discover all manner of trivia. I know I look it up at least 2-3 times a day, often more.

Wikipedia from time to time runs fund-raising drives to try to pay for the upkeep of servers and suchlike, and presumably they’ve been raising enough whether directly or indirectly to keep the show running. I’ve contributed every so often over the last three years, recognising its role in the internet, but what has recently been brought to my attention is that Wikipedia offers an option to have a monthly payment.

“Subscription” was the first word that came to mind, in the magazine sense, or in the sense used these days for software offered on a timed basis, something increasingly common as a way to keep a revenue stream.

However, for Wikipedia, it’s almost more sensible to call it being a patron – in the old school, patron-of-the-arts style, enabling the people behind Wikipedia to do what they need to. I’m telling you all this to try to sell you the idea of paying for Wikipedia – it’s a resource we don’t want to see fail, the most visited site on the internet, all running for free and all built off the contributions of the visitors.

I’m a patron of Wikipedia, all for the miserly sum of $5 a month. You can be one too from as little as $3 – just head over here and sign up to support the best volunteer project in the world.

(And even if I haven’t sold you on being a regular contributor, I should’ve guilted you into throwing a little bit of money Wikipedia’s way, to make up for all those assignments it helped you pass, after all.)