Anyone who uses Wikipedia (somewhere on the order of 340 million of us) has seen the banners that ran at the top of each page during the last few weeks of the year as part of the non-profit online encyclopedia’s annual fundraiser. The banners alternated between comments from donors explaining what Wikipedia means to them and a direct appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

It got me. Upon seeing the quote from Jimmy Wales, I immediately clicked to donate. It could have been the starkness of the request. Or the ridiculous ambition of Wales’ vision for Wikipedia. “Free access to the sum of all human knowledge”? Really?

And yet, that’s what Wikipedia is providing. It’s the third most popular site on the Internet, a vast, real-time, community-sourced knowledge repository that remains…free. No ads, no corporate sponsors. But only because a few hundred thousand donors like me (and maybe like you?) have opted to pay for it.

Does no advertising equal purity of content? Not necessarily. After all, Wikipedia is community-sourced, which means anyone with an agenda can create or edit Wiki pages, leaving it to the crowd to make corrections. Wikipedia has seen its share of controversy about accuracy and comparisons with Encyclopedia Britannica.

The purity — and genius — of Wikipedia comes not from its accuracy, but from the crowd. At any given moment, Wikipedia is an evolving, ground-up view of the current zeitgeist: a view that could be fundamentally altered by the top-down influence that advertising can bring. Wikipedia’s ability to raise enough money to maintain their current model (they raised $6 million in 8 weeks) tells us the crowd cares more about “free of advertising” than free.

If you ask my kids, I’m a Luddite. Totally out of it when it comes to technology, in spite of all evidence to the contrary — the cell phone, the iPod, the iMac and the digital camera. Not to mention my mad TV remote skills.

In truth, many of us are loosely anchored between two emerging forces, Facebook nation and the 3G mobile world. We’re older and wiser, but not ancient. We spend plenty of time online, but don’t live there. We have cell phones, but they don’t double as umbilical cords. We depend on technology, but don’t gasp for breath without it. We’re tech-savvy, but weren’t exactly weaned on it.

Strangely enough, because we grew up in the Dick Tracy era, we have a longstanding fascination with mobile devices and can fathom their potential maybe even more than our Boomer kids can. Indeed, we stand in awe of the possibilities of mobile technology, not only in the U.S., but in countries where mobile is blooming in the absence of a suitable infrastructure for more traditional communications technologies.

Even as mobile apps flow freely into the market and devices amaze us with their capabilities and interfaces, it’s clear there’s still plenty of room for growth.

Where’s mobile headed and what do we want out of it? For users, the answer is more. More ways to connect. More ways to search. More ways to share. More ways to download. More ways to operate on the fly. For marketers, it’s smarter ways to reach and engage users. Smarter ad-funded content. Smarter targeting and analytics. Smarter viral advertising. And rock-solid protection for users who don’t want to receive mobile ads.