The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and operates the world's largest free knowledge projects. Based in San Francisco and founded in 2003, the Foundation maintains the technical infrastructure, servers, and software that power Wikipedia and its sister projects including Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and more. These platforms collectively host over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages, serving approximately 15 billion views each month.
The organization supports a global community of over 265,000 volunteers who create, edit, and curate free knowledge content. Beyond technical operations, the Foundation provides grants to community members and affiliates, advocates for public policies protecting free knowledge, and works to close knowledge gaps through initiatives like 'Open the Knowledge.' As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation is primarily funded through donations from readers, maintaining independence from corporate advertising and commercial influence to ensure knowledge remains accessible to everyone.
