The charity behind Wikipedia writes none of its articles
The Wikimedia Foundation keeps Wikipedia and 14 sister projects online, yet it neither writes nor edits their content; volunteers do all of that. The foundation was created in 2003 largely because early Wikipedians refused to run advertising, and it now lives mainly on millions of small reader donations.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia in 2001 as a side project feeding Nupedia, an older online encyclopedia. Wales's for-profit company Bomis paid the bills at first while a fast-growing volunteer community did the editing. As costs mounted, that community debated how to pay for upkeep and broadly rejected ads, so a charitable foundation became the favoured answer. It also settled who should own the project's trademarks.
Legal incorporation came on June 20, 2003, with St. Petersburg, Florida, as its first home, and it held a small campaign that October just to keep its servers running. The US tax authorities recognised it as a public charity in 2005, making American donations tax-deductible. It filed to trademark the name Wikipedia in the United States in 2004, winning registration in January 2006, with protection granted in Japan and the European Union along the way. A plan to make it a membership organisation was abandoned in 2006 because it could not meet Florida's legal requirements.
In 2007 the board decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area, citing nearby partner organisations, a deeper pool of talent and easier international travel. The move was complete by January 2008, and the headquarters later settled in One Montgomery Tower in 2017.
Today the foundation supplies the technical and organisational backbone, including development of the MediaWiki software, while working with volunteer chapters, thematic groups and user groups worldwide. Fundraising banners and email appeals bring in most of its money, supplemented by grants from philanthropies and tech firms and, since 2022, income from its Wikimedia Enterprise service. By 2023 it had more than 700 staff and contractors, net assets of $255 million and an endowment above $100 million.
Source: Wikimedia Foundation
