Wikipedia's great isn't it?

How many of its articles do you think you've looked at on it this year? 50? 100? More perhaps?

Wikipedia runs no advertising, and receives no government funds. As its founder Jimmy Wales has said "When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but decided to do something different. Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here."

Since its foundation, it has expanded massively. It's the 5th most used site on the planet, with 23 million articles, more than 4.1 million of them in English (Wikipedia is available in 285 languages, the largest being English, then German, French, Dutch and Italian).

The site is currently doing a donation drive. (As it says on their homepage, if everyone who saw the request for donations on their homepage gave the price of a cup of coffee, their fundraiser would be done within an hour.)

Anyone (barring places where it's censored) can find a vast depth of information, entirely for free. It's a staggering, glowing example of how volunteers can work together using the internet for the betterment of society.

We reckon that's worth the price of a cup of coffee.