Dear Reader,

    Today I am going to ask you to support Wikipedia with a donation.

    Wikipedia is built differently from almost every other top 50 websites. We have a small number of paid staff，just twenty­three. Wikipedia content is free to use by anyone for any purpose. Our annual expenses are less than six million dollars. Wikipedia is run by the non­profit Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded in 2003.

    Wikipedia is driven by a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers — all devoted to sharing knowledge freely. Over almost eight years, these volunteers have contributed more than 11 million articles in 265 languages. More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information,free of charge and free of advertising.

    But Wikipedia is more than a website. We share a common cause: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's our commitment.

    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 are committed to increasing the free knowledge movement worldwide, by taking on new volunteers, and building strategic partnerships with institutions of culture and learning.

    Wikipedia is different. It's the largest encyclopedia (百科全书) in history, 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.

    Thank you,

Jimmy Wales

    The writings of Shakespeare are today little read by young people in Britain. His young readership is limited to those who choose to study literature at university.

    Shakespeare's work, together with most other classics, is seen as remote, and written in a 400­year­old version of English that is about as inviting as toothache.

    Still, in Britain schools, it is compulsory to study the bard(诗人), and when something is made compulsory, usually the result is boredom, resentment(憎恨) or both.

    This was my experience of the classics at school. But when I reached my late teenage years, I had a change of heart. Like every other young person since the dawn of time, the world confused me. I wanted answers, so I turned to books to find them.

    I went on to take a PhD in literature and have taught it in Britain and China. I have never regretted it. There is something in literature that people want, even if they don't read books. You see this in the popularity of TV and movie adaptations of great works, the recent film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice being a case in point. These popular adaptations may help increase people's interest in the classics.

    Reading a simplified Romeo and Juliet may perhaps lead to a reading of Shakespeare's actual play. If that is the case, then I welcome the trend. But do not make the mistake of thinking that it is the same thing. Shakespeare is a poet. His greatness is in his language. Reading someone else's rewriting of his work is like peeling a banana, throwing away the fruit, and eating the skin. Take on the original. It really is worth the effort.