User:HNordeen (WMF)/About the Wikimedia Foundaiton
About the Wikimedia Foundation
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The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, the other Wikimedia free knowledge websites, and its mission of free knowledge for all. We do this by keeping the Wikimedia sites fast, secure, and available to all, defending Wikipedia and our volunteer editors from legal threats, building new features and tools to make it easy to read, edit, and share knowledge from Wikimedia sites, and by supporting the communities of editors who contribute to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites. We also help bring new knowledge online, lower barriers to access, and make it easier for everyone to share what they know.
Over the past 20 years, Wikipedia has become a trusted source of information that millions of people rely on every day. With more than 6,700 pageviews every second and more than 345 edits a minute, Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites in the world, and the only major website run by a nonprofit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation.
Unlike other top websites, Wikipedia is not funded through advertising, nor does it rely on selling data about users for profit. Instead, Wikipedia is supported by its readers - people who find value in Wikipedia and want to continue to support its success, with the average single donation being about $15 USD and the average monthly donation about $4 USD. This financial model enables Wikipedia to remain neutral, trusted, and free from commercial interests.
Here are just some of the ways we use donations to sustain Wikipedia and free knowledge:
- Providing top-notch technical infrastructure for a global website - To meet the needs of Wikipedia readers around the world, we operate an international technology infrastructure comparable to the world’s largest commercial websites. This includes hosting costs like keeping our servers running, as well as significant, ongoing engineering work to make sure Wikipedia is reliable, secure, loads quickly, and protects your privacy.
- Ensuring you can access Wikipedia in every language on every device - Donations also allow us to dedicate engineering resources to ensure that you can access Wikipedia in your preferred language, on your preferred device, no matter where you are in the world — from a dial-up modem to a brand new smartphone. Most major websites support an average of 50-100 languages — Wikipedia supports roughly 300 languages, a number that grows every year. When you break it down, we have about one employee for every four million monthly readers of Wikipedia.
- Supporting community-led projects to increase access to trusted information - We collaborate with Wikipedia volunteers around the globe to support their ideas and help them bring more free knowledge to the world. Every year, about 10% of our budget is specifically dedicated to supporting community projects that enrich, grow, and improve knowledge on Wikipedia.
- Defending and protecting free knowledge around the world - The Wikimedia Foundation’s policy and legal efforts help ensure that everyone has the right to access, share, and create knowledge, while defending our volunteers from threat of reprisal, and upholding our commitment to free expression and open knowledge. We advocate for free licenses and open source software and work to make sure that copyright laws are built and reformed so that people can share and use knowledge more broadly. We also fight against censorship and protect the right of everyone to speak and learn freely. Support for this work is vital to giving users everywhere equal access to Wikimedia projects.