My first donation through internet

by vijay

Few minutes back, I donated to Wikipedia.

I am very happy that I am writing a blog post on it. Here is what was going through my mind during the process.

“Hey, who is this guy giving a huge pose, glaring at me and standing atop the article I want to read.” About few years back, I never had to scroll to view the first thing I want to know at Wikipedia. But now they have this banner with one of the person from the Wikimedia foundation that reads something like : “A personal appeal from ____, programmer at Wikipedia”.

“Usually it’s the Jimmy Wales guy who shows up, but this time, it’s a new guy.” I clicked it to see what he had to say in short: he was working for wikimedia for the holy cause that they are for – To make the available knowledge in the world accessible to everybody in its pure form for free. He wanted it to stay alive and if I wanted it too, asked me to offer what I can.

“I have lost few hundreds of money due to my stupidity in the past, spent it in useless stuff, spend thousands on vacations. Why should I not donate?” Nothing was forcing me to do so. I recollected the huge amount of times Wikipedia showed up as the first result in Google and how it provided the light for me to march towards my destination. “Nobody will know if I do so this way. Why should I?” There was a small me asking that question. I quickly kicked it off knowing that it is stupid. “I should do something because I choose to do so, not because somebody will approve or applaud it”. And then I chose that I will go ahead and proceeded to donate Rs.X*.

Wikpedia gave me a HTML snippet that I can put in my blog to show-off.

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