Wikimedia Foundation


The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American 501 nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. The Foundation is most known for being the host of Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world. It also hosts fourteen related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software which underpins them all. The foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund Wikipedia and other wiki projects which had previously been hosted by Bomis, Wales' for-profit company.
The Wikimedia Foundation provides the technical and organizational infrastructure to enable members of the public to develop wiki-based content in languages across the world. The foundation does not write or curate any of the content on the projects themselves. Instead, this is done by volunteer editors, such as the Wikipedians. However, it does collaborate with a network of individual volunteers and affiliated organizations, such as Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups and other partners.
The foundation finances itself mainly through millions of small donations from readers and editors, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia and its sister projects. These are complemented by grants from philanthropic organizations and tech companies, and starting in 2022, by services income from Wikimedia Enterprise. As of 2023, it has employed over 700 staff and contractors, with net assets of $255 million and an endowment which has surpassed $100 million.

History

and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as a feeder project to supplement Nupedia. The project was originally funded by Bomis, Wales's for-profit business, and edited by a rapidly growing community of volunteer editors. The early community discussed a variety of ways to support the ongoing costs of upkeep, and was broadly opposed to running ads on the site, so the idea of setting up a charitable foundation gained prominence. That addressed an open question of what entity should hold onto trademarks for the project.
The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated in St. Petersburg, Florida, on June 20, 2003. A small fundraising campaign to keep the servers running was run in October 2003. In 2005, the foundation was granted section 501 status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity, making donations to the foundation tax-deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities code is B60.
The foundation filed an application to trademark the name Wikipedia in the US to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences on September 14, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded also by Japan on December 16, 2004, and by the European Union on January 20, 2005. Subsets of Wikipedia were already being distributed in book and DVD form, and there were discussions about licensing the logo and wordmark.
On December 11, 2006, the foundation's board noted that it could not become a membership organization, as initially planned but not implemented, due to an inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida statutory law. The bylaws were accordingly amended to remove all references to membership rights and activities.
In 2007, the foundation decided to move its headquarters from Florida to the San Francisco Bay Area. Considerations cited for choosing San Francisco were proximity to like-minded organizations and potential partners, a better talent pool, as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel. The move was completed by January 31, 2008, into a headquarters on Stillman Street in San Francisco. It later moved to New Montgomery Street, and then in 2017 to One Montgomery Tower.
On October 25, 2021, the foundation launched Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial Wikimedia content delivery service aimed at groups that want to use high-volume APIs, starting with Big Tech enterprises. In June 2022, Google and the Internet Archive were announced as the service's first customers, though only Google will pay for the service. The same announcement noted a shifting focus towards smaller companies with similar data needs, supporting the service through "a lot paying a little".

Projects and initiatives

Content projects

The foundation operates 12 wiki-based content projects that are written and governed by volunteer editors. They include, by launch date:
The foundation also operates wikis and services that provide infrastructure or coordination of the content projects. These include:
  • Meta-Wiki – a central wiki for coordinating all projects and the Wikimedia community
  • Wikimedia Incubator – a wiki for drafting the core pages of new language editions in development
  • MediaWiki.org – a wiki for coordinating work on the MediaWiki software
  • Wikitech – a wiki for hosting technical documentation for Wikimedia infrastructure and other projects
  • Wikimedia Cloud Services — hosting provider for tools
  • Wikimedia Phabricator – a global ticketing system for tracking issues and feature requests powered by Phorge, a fork of the open-source development collaboration tool Phabricator

    Wikimedia Enterprise

Wikimedia Enterprise is a commercial product by the Wikimedia Foundation to provide, in a more easily consumable way, the data of the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. It allows customers to retrieve data at large scale and high availability through different formats like Web APIs, data snapshots or streams.
It was announced in March 2021, and launched on October 26, 2021. Google and the Internet Archive were its first customers, although Internet Archive is not paying for the product. A New York Times Magazine article was reporting that Wikimedia Enterprise made $3.1 million in total revenue in 2022.

Affiliates

Wikimedia affiliates are independent and formally recognized groups of people working together to support and contribute to the Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia Foundation officially recognizes three types of affiliates: chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. Affiliates organize and engage in activities to support and contribute to the Wikimedia movement, such as regional conferences, outreach, edit-a-thons, hackathons, public relations, public policy advocacy, GLAM engagement, and Wikimania. While many of these things are also done by individual contributors or less formal groups, they are not referred to as affiliates.
Wikimedia chapters and thematic organizations are incorporated non-profit organizations. They are recognized by the foundation as affiliates officially when its board does so. The board's decisions are based on recommendations of an Affiliations Committee, composed of Wikimedia community members, which reports regularly to the board. The Affiliations Committee directly approves the recognition of unincorporated user groups. Affiliates are formally recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation, but are independent of it, with no legal control of or responsibility for Wikimedia projects and their content.
The foundation began recognizing chapters in 2004. In 2012, the foundation approved, finalized and adopted the thematic organization and user group recognition models. An additional model for movement partners, was also approved, but as of 2022 has not yet been finalized or adopted.

Wikimania

Wikimania is an annual global conference for Wikimedians and Wikipedians, started in 2005. The first Wikimania was held in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2005. Wikimania is organized by a committee supported usually by the local national chapter, with support from local institutions and usually from the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimania has been held in cities such as Buenos Aires, Cambridge, Haifa, Hong Kong, Taipei, London, Mexico City, Esino Lario, Italy, Montreal, Canada, Cape Town, Stockholm, and Nairobi. The 2020 conference scheduled to take place in Bangkok was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, along with those of 2021 and 2022, which were held online as a series of virtual, interactive presentations. The in-person conference returned in 2023 when it was held in Singapore, at which UNESCO joined as a partner organization. In 2024, Wikimania was held in Katowice, Poland.

Technology

The Wikimedia Foundation maintains the hardware that runs its projects in its own servers. It also maintains the MediaWiki platform and many other software libraries that run its projects.

Hardware

Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. Server downtime in 2003 led to the first fundraising drive. By December 2009, Wikimedia ran on co-located servers, with 300 servers in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam. In 2008, it also switched from multiple different Linux operating system vendors to Ubuntu Linux. In 2019, it switched to Debian.
By January 2013, Wikimedia transitioned to newer infrastructure in an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia, citing reasons of "more reliable connectivity" and "fewer hurricanes". In years prior, the hurricane seasons had been a cause of distress.
In October 2013, Wikimedia Foundation started looking for a second facility that would be used side by side with the main facility in Ashburn, citing reasons of redundancy and to prepare for simultaneous multi-datacenter service. This followed a year in which a fiber cut caused the Wikimedia projects to be unavailable for one hour in August 2012. The result of this was another datacenter being added in 2014 at a CyrusOne facility in Carrollton, Texas, to further improve reliability. Both datacenters work as the primary one in alternate semesters, with the other one working as secondary datacenter.
Apart from the second facility for redundancy coming online in 2014, the number of servers needed to run the infrastructure in a single facility has been mostly stable since 2009. As of November 2015, the main facility in Ashburn hosts 520 servers in total which includes servers for newer services besides Wikimedia project wikis, such as cloud services and various services for metrics, monitoring, and other system administration. In 2017, Wikimedia Foundation deployed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia. In 2024, a caching data center was opened in São Paulo, the first of its kind in South America.