Here is a fun fact for your next party: Of the top-ten most-visited websites in the world, Wikipedia is the only one to be run by a nonprofit: the Wikimedia Foundation.
In this role, we are responsible for hosting and protecting Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We do not have an editorial role on Wikipedia. Rather, all of the information you read on Wikipedia is created and curated by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world. Together, they compile and share information on notable subjects—citing reliable sources such as newspaper articles and peer-reviewed journals—according to the encyclopedia’s editorial policies and guidelines, which are also developed by volunteers.
In addition to this human-led content governance model, another special thing about Wikipedia is that it does not rely on advertising, subscription fees, or selling users’ personal data for funding. Instead, the vast majority of our funding comes from reader donations that average $11.
Fulfilling Wikipedia’s unique and important mission of bringing knowledge to everyone on the planet requires significant and ongoing investment. Below, we explain how your donations are used and how they sustain Wikipedia. We strive for transparency, so you can also explore more details in our publicly available financial reports.
Technology
Nearly half (45%) of our budget goes toward supporting the technology that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We are constantly working to enhance the user experience for both contributors and readers, improving site security, and ensuring reliable access to our websites globally. This work helps to sustain a top global website, all at a fraction of the cost of popular for-profit websites, amid an internet environment that is rapidly changing.
When you open an article on Wikipedia, it is served to you by one of our seven data centers across the world. We added our newest data center in Brazil in 2024, which immediately lowered the average time it takes a reader in Brazil to load Wikipedia by one-third of a second. That’s important because it helps people get critical knowledge in a speedy amount of time. These data centers also keep Wikipedia online in times of unprecedented traffic, like the 800,000 requests per second we saw when a new pope was elected in mid-2025.
Additionally, Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets used in training LLMs. As technology companies are increasingly scraping our human-made content, ongoing investments in our infrastructure are crucial to being able to maintain fast, reliable, and secure connections for every person, amid growing demands to serve Wikipedia’s knowledge across multiple formats and devices.
The Foundation has also increased investment in tools to help volunteer editors expand knowledge on the site so that it remains relevant, accurate, and useful. For example, our content translation tool has been used to translate more than 2.4 million of Wikipedia’s 65 million articles to date. Investments like these help Wikipedia maintain its position as one of the most multilingual sites in the world, with content available in more than 300 languages. In the last two years, we have also added a dark mode to Wikimedia sites to increase their accessibility, made it easier to show data on Wikipedia, and more.
We’re also investing in reaching new and younger audiences, developing experiments to understand how we can engage them with our mission. This includes reaching people on short form video platforms, through gaming, and more.
Maintaining infrastructure like this and continuously ensuring Wikipedia is online, available, secure, and accessible for its hundreds of millions of readers and editors around the world takes significant financial and staff resourcing.
Volunteers
About a third (32%) of our budget is devoted to supporting volunteers, whose hard work is behind all of the information you see on Wikipedia.
We give volunteers the tools they need to succeed, whether that’s building features that make editing Wikipedia an easier process or supporting systems that help volunteers more quickly and easily catch vandalism. We also support the growth of volunteer editor communities around the world to help improve the content on Wikipedia, close knowledge gaps, and make it more representative of our world.
Wikipedia is built on the premise that it becomes better when more people of different backgrounds and beliefs contribute well-sourced and neutral information to the project; our grantmaking supports this goal. In fiscal year 24–25, we dispersed $18,232,260 across 417 grants, an increase of $1.8 million over the previous year. All of these grants are transparently documented. Our grants do not determine content on Wikipedia. They support volunteers and groups who keep Wikipedia accurate, neutral, and representative of the world’s knowledge and full range of perspectives. For example, we gave $180,000 to the Wiki Project Med Foundation to help them continue their work in making quality health and medical information available on Wikimedia projects.
Additionally, we undertake legal and advocacy efforts to protect people’s right to access and contribute to free knowledge. This can include protecting free expression rights; opposing government-imposed censorship; and educating governments, regulators, and lawmakers to defend people’s right to access and share knowledge globally. As threats to our model continue to rise around the world, this work becomes even more vital to ensure access to free, reliable information is protected.
General expenses
Like all other nonprofit organizations, we have standard operational support requirements—for us, they make up 12% of our budget. A variety of shared services functions are needed to ensure that we are compliant with legal and similar obligations, as well as generally accepted accounting standards. These include human resources, finance, legal, communications, information technology, and more. Together, these allow us to run an efficient and effective organization, as well as support our volunteer communities, staff, and readers around the world.
Another 11% of our budget is devoted to donor support, which is crucial to sustaining Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Our team can respond to donors in 25 languages, and we are committed to efficient and effective fundraising throughout the year, ensuring that every contribution helps advance our mission. Every donation we receive is invested back into serving Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission.
Our overall efficiency is one reason why we earned the highest rating from Charity Navigator as well as the Platinum Seal of Transparency from Candid (formerly GuideStar).
Looking ahead
Wikipedia exists because millions of people around the world believe that knowledge should belong to everyone. Over the last 25 years, these small acts of generosity have come together to keep one of the world’s last open spaces truly independent and free. We hope you’ll join us in continuing to support Wikipedia for the next 25 years and beyond.
“I am deeply grateful to Wikipedia for continuing to preserve fact-based content. I appreciate that you need donors to enable you to stay independent. These days it feels like your work is a cornerstone of democracy.”
Donor
● Canada
“I believe that Wikipedia is the most valuable thing that has been created since the advent of the internet. ‘By the people, for the people.’ Its value grows exponentially year by year in the face of the deformation of information as we once knew it.”
Donor
● US
“In our world where education and knowledge are often ‘fiscally gated’ it’s astonishing to me that Wikipedia remains FREE with its instantly accessible and incredibly valuable portal into every type of information out there – be it fascinatingly complex or mundane basic.”
Donor
● New Zealand
If you would like to learn more about our funding, please see this blog post or our frequently asked questions.
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