For over almost 25 years, Wikipedia has grown to become the backbone of knowledge on the internet. What started as a wildly ambitious and probably impossible dream is now an essential knowledge resource for humanity. It includes over 65 million articles in over 300 languages, all funded by readers like you.
Wikipedia is filled with knowledge by nearly 250,000 volunteers from all kinds of backgrounds. They edit articles, check facts, fix code, and document information from a neutral point of view. Together, they make the internet’s knowledge better. Millions of readers visit Wikipedia each day and benefit from their work—all without seeing an advertisement, encountering a paywall, or being tracked. But have you ever wondered who pays to keep it online?
Wikipedia operates on a unique revenue model, relying primarily on donations from everyday people who believe that knowledge should belong to everyone. In fact, out of all the world’s most-visited websites, Wikipedia is the only one that is run by a nonprofit organization—the Wikimedia Foundation. This grassroots, reader-funder model protects the independence of Wikipedia. It is run at a fraction of the cost of other top websites, and we invest every donation received back into serving Wikipedia and the dream of making reliable knowledge available to all.
Let’s dive in to learn more.
Who operates Wikipedia?
The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in the United States. Within that legal designation, we operate as a public charity with an educational mission of making knowledge available to everyone. We accomplish that by supporting Wikipedia as well as a number of other free and open source sister projects, including Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, and more.
Our mission is to make knowledge freely available to everyone—independent and without commercial influence. We host technology infrastructure that makes billions of visits to Wikipedia on a monthly basis possible. Because of our steady investments in that technology, Wikipedia can easily handle record-breaking spikes, preventing disruption to the reading or editing experience.
Since our founding in 2003, we have supported hundreds of thousands of volunteer editors who edit, expand, and curate content on the Wikimedia projects. We equip these volunteers with the most up-to-date tools; ensure connections to Wikipedia are fast, safe and private; provide individuals and organizations around the world with funding to increase knowledge on Wikipedia; and undertake legal and advocacy efforts to protect people’s right to free knowledge.
How is Wikipedia funded?
Support from grassroots donors
Wikipedia is funded primarily through single or monthly donations from millions of individuals around the world. The vast majority of our funding comes from regular readers of Wikipedia in over 200 countries who give $11 or less. Many of them tell us that they support our mission because they find value in what Wikipedia provides and what it stands for.
Our revenue model is ideal because it reflects our values: built by people, for people. It also helps protect our independence by limiting the influence of any single organization or individual on Wikipedia’s content.
What else funds Wikipedia?
While the vast majority of our funding comes from the public, the remainder is received from three sources: major gifts, an endowment, and Wikimedia Enterprise.
Support from major gifts
Each year, around 2,000 individuals and institutions make donations of above $1,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation. The vast majority of these gifts are unrestricted donations to the Foundation’s general operating fund, meaning the Foundation can choose how best to use them. A small number of purpose-restricted donations are made each year, which help donors make a specific impact on our mission. Some recent restricted donations include support from the Rockefeller Foundation and Google.org for the development of Abstract Wikipedia, a project to let more people share more knowledge in more languages, as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation‘s support of our AI strategy.
Wikimedia Endowment
The Wikimedia Endowment was established in 2016 as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. It is a 501(c)(3) charity, separate from the Wikimedia Foundation, headquartered in the United States. Endowments enable proactive financial planning for organizations that have missions spanning across generations. Gifts to the Wikimedia Endowment support a solid financial foundation for the future and support long-term security for Wikipedia and its mission. By contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation raises funds that support daily operations.
During times of prosperity, the Wikimedia Endowment serves as a springboard for growth and innovation. During tough economic times, the endowment helps fund the most critical operations that keep the Wikimedia projects functioning. Currently, grants from the endowment are funding technical innovation so the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, stay relevant in a time of rapid technological change.
Wikimedia Enterprise
Dozens of generative artificial intelligence models use content from Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects to serve up results. Technology companies are increasingly scraping that human-made content and distributing it through new search experiences and other technologies. Sixty-five percent of our most expensive traffic now comes from these sorts of high-volume reusers. All of that consumes bandwidth and resources that we need to support the Wikimedia projects, contributors, and readers.
In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation established Wikimedia Enterprise as a commercial product for large-scale reusers and distributors of Wikimedia content. It is an opt-in product that allows companies to use Wikipedia content at scale and sustainably without severely taxing Wikipedia’s servers, while also enabling them to support our nonprofit mission. When used at a high volume or speed, this is a paid-for service. Our content is (and always will be) free for humans to reuse, but this was never intended to extend to corporations who are making large profits from the work of our volunteering community.
Put simply: Wikipedia’s content is free, but its infrastructure is not.
How can I verify all this info?
The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to empower people worldwide to collect, develop, and share knowledge can only be achieved through a combination of trust and transparency. That is why we regularly share our annual plans, annual reports, and financial reports (including annual audits from an independent firm, in line with nonprofit best practices). These documents outline how funds are raised and used, and all are available for public review and analysis. Our efforts towards transparency have earned us the highest rating from Charity Navigator as well as the Platinum Seal of Transparency from Candid (formerly GuideStar).
Wikipedia relies on all of us
Nearly 25 years after its founding, Wikipedia continues to exist because millions of people around the world believe that knowledge should belong to everyone—and they choose to keep it free.
If you would like to donate to Wikipedia now, please see donate.wikimedia.org. If you would like to learn more about how the Wikimedia Foundation uses donated funds, please see this blog post.
Latest news
The post How is Wikipedia funded? appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.