User:Masterhomer/Affinity Card

Introduction

The Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an affinity card in order raise funds to continue development and maintenance of Wikipedia, an online, free encyclopedia licensed under the GNU-FDL, and other associated projects, including Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and Wikisource. These projects constitute a vast international volunteer effort to produce high quality information that is accessible online free of charge. The English-language Wikipedia, the first of approximately three hundred related projects, was launched in January 2001. Since then, it has grown, solely on the basis of a vast and committed volunteer effort to over 440,000 articles, and has been the basis for similar projects of varying sizes in over fifty languages. These include very large projects like the German-language Wikipedia, with over 150,000 articles, to the Cherokee-language Wikipedia, which is just getting started. Combined with the other Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia has become the most comprehensive online reference material site in the world. Wikipedia articles are often updated within minutes of a major event.

User base

Wikimedia maintains some of the most active websites on the Internet. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the 205th most visited site on the Internet. Wikimedia web servers manage over nine hundred page views per second. Over 150,000 people have registered as editors on the English Wikipedia, and that number has grown drastically since Wikipedia’s birth.

About Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization registered in the state of Florida, was founded on June 20, 2003 to facilitate and coordinate operations of Wikipedia and its sister projects. These other projects include Wiktionary (a dictionary), Wikibooks (a collection of free and community-written textbooks) and Wikisource (a collection of annotated and translated public-domain source materials). The aim of the Wikimedia Foundation is to spread knowledge by creating free, high quality learning resources, and to build a community devoted to this purpose. The Foundation believes that anyone can be a teacher by sharing their knowledge with others, and as such, encourages everyone to "edit" Wikimedia pages. Regardless of the scope of their participation, each author enhances the quality of the material for the next generation of users. The community has grown at an exponential rate since the founding of the first project, the English-language Wikipedia. Some 150,000 people worldwide have contributed to this effort in any number of ways, and in so doing, created a tightly knit community that transcends national, cultural, ideological, political, and religious boundaries. These divisions, too often over-emphasized in daily life, are superseded by the sense of commitment to a common goal: making knowledge free and accessible to everyone.