Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the American nonprofit organization that hosts and protects Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Founded in 2003, it is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, and it leaves decisions about what articles say to volunteer editors.

History of the Wikimedia Foundation

The Foundation says it was founded in 2003. Its stated vision is a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Since its founding it has supported what it describes as hundreds of thousands of volunteer editors, giving them tools, keeping connections to Wikipedia fast, safe and private, and building new technology for readers and editors. Britannica describes Wikipedia as overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

The Foundation now hosts over a dozen free knowledge projects, with Wikipedia the best known. Wikipedia is available in over 300 languages, and the Foundation says it is read by millions of people every month. The infrastructure the Foundation runs handles billions of visits to Wikipedia each month, including record traffic spikes.

The Foundation describes its mission as empowering people worldwide to collect, develop and share knowledge. It says that mission depends on trust and transparency, which is why it regularly publishes updates, including annual reports and audited financial statements. In recent years its audited statements have also listed income from Wikimedia Enterprise and from investments alongside donations.

Structure and governance

The Foundation’s activities are overseen by a Board of Trustees. Its members include people elected by the Wikimedia affiliate and project communities, as well as subject matter experts. The Foundation also employs a global team, and it publishes information about its staff, leadership and governance for the public.

The division of labor between staff and volunteers is central to how the organization works. Nearly 250,000 volunteers around the world edit articles, check facts, add citations, debate sources and moderate content. They are guided by the principle of writing from a neutral point of view. The Foundation states plainly that it does not make content decisions on Wikipedia.

The Foundation’s donation revenue includes grants from the Wikimedia Endowment, which is a separate organization. The two share staffing and other resources under a cost sharing agreement, and the Endowment reimburses the Foundation for that use.

What the Wikimedia Foundation does

The Foundation’s first job is technical: it hosts the servers and software that make Wikipedia and its sister projects available to anyone with an internet connection. It says its priorities include keeping the sites fast, reliable and available to everyone, and it describes running Wikipedia on only a fraction of what it costs to run other major websites.

The Foundation also develops new technology and products to meet the demands of readers and editors, a task that includes tools for volunteers and measures to keep reading and editing private. It provides funding to individuals and organizations around the world to increase the knowledge on Wikipedia, and it carries out legal and advocacy work to protect what it calls the right to free knowledge. Because Wikipedia carries no advertising or paywalls, these functions depend on other sources of money, described below.

The Foundation’s site calls Wikipedia the backbone of the internet’s knowledge and says it wants everyone, including chatbots, to be able to learn from it. The projects are built on the open web, and the Foundation’s work sits alongside the technologies described in the entry on the World Wide Web. Its governance relies on practices familiar from nonprofit management and volunteer management.

Funding of the Wikimedia Foundation

The Foundation says that most of its funding comes from readers, with the average single donation around USD 10. Because it is backed mainly by small contributions, it says it can maintain transparency and autonomy, and it describes itself as not for sale.

Its fiscal year ends on 30 June. In fiscal year 2024 to 2025, total revenue rose by USD 23.2 million to USD 208.6 million. Donation revenue, including Endowment grants, grew from USD 174.7 million to USD 189.5 million.

Expenses that year totaled USD 190.9 million. Of that, 77.4 percent went to programmatic activities, 11.4 percent to fundraising and 11.2 percent to general and administrative support. As of 30 June 2025 the Foundation’s net assets were USD 296.6 million, which it says equals 17.1 months of operating expenses. The Foundation states that the spending shares above are well within the range of best practice for nonprofits.

In its fundraising report for the same year, the Foundation counted 7.7 million donors, down 2.4 percent from 7.9 million the year before. New donors fell 10.2 percent, from 2.6 million to 2.3 million. The average donation across all channels was USD 10.15, up 1 percent.

Criticism and challenges

The Foundation itself identifies a pressure on its model. Its fundraising report notes that it has begun to see the effects of declining human traffic on Wikipedia as people change how they find information online. The number of donors fell in the period, although total fundraising results stayed steady because those who gave contributed more on average.

Because volunteers control content, disagreements about what articles should say are settled by editors through discussion, not by Foundation staff. That arrangement protects editorial independence, but it also means the Foundation hosts a project whose content it does not direct.

Legacy and impact

The Foundation’s own description of its model is a nonprofit that provides the technology while roughly 250,000 volunteers write the content. Its funding rests mainly on small gifts from readers, averaging about USD 10, and its financial results are published each year.

Whether that model can continue as readers change how they find information is the question its own fundraising report raises. The Foundation points to steady results and a loyal donor base as reasons for confidence, while acknowledging that the number of donors is falling.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue