Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation founded in 2003. It hosts Wikipedia and operates a network of free knowledge projects - including Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons - that collectively publish over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages. The platforms receive approximately 15 billion pageviews each month, making them among the most visited destinations on the internet.

The Foundation is funded almost entirely through reader donations and accepts no corporate advertising, preserving its editorial and operational independence. Beyond hosting infrastructure, it provides grants to community members and affiliate organisations, advocates for public policies that protect free knowledge, and runs initiatives aimed at closing global knowledge gaps.

Its technical work spans large-scale web platform development, server infrastructure and operations, open structured data (Wikidata), and media file hosting (Wikimedia Commons). This infrastructure supports a global volunteer community of over 265,000 contributors who create and maintain content across the Foundation's projects.