Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and operates the world's largest free knowledge projects. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in San Francisco, the Foundation maintains the technical infrastructure, servers and software that power Wikipedia and its sister projects. Its platforms host over 65 million articles across more than 300 languages and receive approximately 15 billion views per month, supported by a global community of over 265,000 volunteers.

Engineering work at the Foundation spans web infrastructure, server operations, open-source software development and knowledge platform engineering. Its projects include Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia; Wiktionary, a free dictionary and lexical content project; Wikibooks, free textbook and instructional content; Wikidata, a free structured knowledge base; and Wikimedia Commons, a free media file repository. All software developed for these platforms is open source.

The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded primarily through donations from readers, and is independent of corporate advertising and commercial influence. It provides grants to community members and affiliates, advocates for public policies that protect free knowledge, and runs equity and knowledge-gap initiatives such as "Open the Knowledge". Its stated mission is to keep knowledge accessible to everyone.