Dear Reader, Today I'm going to ask you to support Wikipedia with a donation. Sounds unusual: Why does one of the world's five most popular websites ask for financial support from its users? Wikipedia is built differently from almost every other top 50.We have a small number of paid staff, just twentythree. Wikipedia content is free to use by anyone for any purpose. Wikipedia is run by the nonprofit Wikipedia Foundation, which I founded in 2003. Wikipedia's driven by a global community   of more than 150,000 volunteers, all devoted to sharing knowledge freely. More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information, free of charge and free of advertising. Your donation helps us in several ways. Most importantly, you will help us cover the increasing cost of managing global traffic to one of the most popular websites on the Internet. Funds also help us improve the software that runs Wikipedia, making it easier to search, easier to read, and easier to write for. We're bent on growing the free knowledge movement worldwide, by employing new volunteers, and building strategic   partnerships with institutes of culture and learning. Wikipedia is different. It's the largest encyclopedia   in history, all written by volunteers. Like a national park or a school, we don't believe advertising should have a place in Wikipedia. We want to keep it free and strong, but we need the support of thousands of people like you, for your donation will help keep Wikipedia free for the whole world. Thank you! Jimmy Wales From the letter we can know donations will help do the following for Wikipedia EXCEPT   _  .
take on some new volunteers develop an effective new software access free knowledge more easily cover the increasing cost of management