Wikimedia Foundation

On June 20, 2003, Jimmy Wales announced the founding of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit to run Wikipedia and give it a stable and trusted institutional base; the name “Wikimedia” had been suggested earlier that year by Wikipedia editor Sheldon Rampton.⁠[1]

The Wikimedia Foundation’s US federal tax exemption was issued in March 2005; it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with employer identification number 20-0049703.⁠[2]

In October 2007 the foundation announced it would move its headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco in January, to make it easier to recruit web developers and engineers and to be closer to Wikia, its for-profit sibling in San Mateo; Wales kept his residence in Florida.⁠[3]

The foundation then had six full-time employees, not all of whom would relocate. Wales said St. Petersburg was cheap to live in but lacked tech talent, while board chair Florence Devouard pointed to the area’s online talent and top-tier universities.⁠[4]

In March 2008 the foundation announced a $3 million gift from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, payable over three years; in the previous year its total income had been about $2.7 million and its expenses about $2.1 million.⁠[5]

In January 2012 the foundation said it had raised $20 million from more than a million donors; it then employed about 80 people full-time, and its planned spending for 2011–12 was $28.3 million.⁠[6]

The 2012 fundraiser ran for nine days on the English Wikipedia in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand and raised $25 million from more than 1.2 million donors; the previous year’s drive had lasted 46 days and raised $20 million.⁠[7]

In May 2013 board chair Kat Walsh announced the search for a new executive director; Sue Gardner had said about six weeks earlier that she would step down, and was staying on until a successor was found.⁠[8]

In May 2014 the board unanimously appointed Lila Tretikov executive director, effective June 1. Born in the Soviet Union, she moved to the United States as a teenager and had worked at Sun Microsystems and, for eight years, at SugarCRM; Gardner, who had led the foundation for seven years, became a special adviser.⁠[9]

Under Tretikov the foundation had an annual budget of about $59 million, almost all from donations, and about 215 full-time employees in San Francisco supporting some 85,000 active volunteer editors; English-language editors had fallen 35% from 2007.⁠[10]

On July 30, 2014, the foundation began accepting bitcoin donations through CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry, which converted them to US dollars at once so the foundation held no bitcoin; in March that year Wales had accidentally started a bitcoin donation campaign.⁠[11]

On March 10, 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation and eight other organizations, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sued the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice over the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance; Executive Director Tretikov said Wikipedia was founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry and information.⁠[12]

In March 2016, about two weeks after Tretikov announced her resignation, the board and executive team chose Chief Communications Officer Katherine Maher as interim executive director; board chair Patricio Lorente said the immediate priorities were building trust, improving communications and filling key leadership positions.⁠[13]

In January 2017 Craigslist founder Craig Newmark gave $500,000, split equally between the craigslist Charitable Fund and the Craig Newmark Foundation, to the foundation’s Community health initiative to reduce harassment and vandalism on Wikipedia.⁠[14]

In September 2018, ahead of a European Parliament vote, foundation board chair María Sefidari Huici warned that Article 13 of the EU copyright reform would push platforms toward costly, often biased automatic filtering systems; in July several local-language Wikipedias had temporarily blacked out in protest.⁠[15]

In January 2019 Google.org announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment, the fund supporting the foundation’s long-term future, and the foundation received a further $1.1 million through a GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry employee giving campaign; Google’s total contributions to Wikimedia exceeded $7.5 million.⁠[16]

In September 2019, days after Wikipedia suffered a massive, sustained DDoS attack, Craig Newmark Philanthropies gave the foundation $2.5 million to strengthen its security; Director of Security John Bennett said it faced skilled and determined attackers.⁠[17]

On February 4, 2021, Katherine Maher announced she would step down as CEO, with April 15 as her last day, marking seven years with the foundation; among recent milestones she cited Wikipedia’s 20th birthday, the launch of the Universal Code of Conduct and the movement strategy recommendations.⁠[18]

Maryana Iskander, whose appointment was announced in September 2021, officially took office as CEO in January 2022.⁠[19]

Before starting, Iskander made a two-month listening tour, talking with a few hundred volunteers and staff across 55 countries; in her first-year update in February 2023 she said the foundation had reimagined its annual plan to anchor it more firmly in the movement’s strategic direction.⁠[20]

In June 2022 the foundation announced Google and the Internet Archive as the first customers of Wikimedia Enterprise, a year-old service for companies reusing Wikimedia content at high volume; Google would pay, while the Internet Archive would not.⁠[21]

Wikimedia v. NSA was first dismissed by the district court and partly reversed by the Fourth Circuit; in 2018 the district court dismissed it again on state-secrets grounds, which a divided Fourth Circuit upheld. On February 21, 2023, the US Supreme Court denied the petition for certiorari.⁠[22]

On April 30, 2025, the foundation’s director of machine learning, Chris Albon, and head of research, Leila Zia, set out a three-year AI strategy: using AI to remove technical barriers, automate repetitive tasks, improve discovery of information, automate translation and help onboard new volunteers, rather than to replace human volunteers.⁠[23]

The foundation’s Form 990 for the fiscal year ending June 2025 showed total revenue of about $205.4 million, including about $187.6 million in contributions, expenses of about $189.7 million and compensation of about $531,000 for CEO Maryana Iskander; revenue in the previous fiscal year was about $185.4 million.⁠[2]

In November 2025 the foundation urged generative-AI developers to credit the human contributors behind Wikipedia content and to access it through the paid Wikimedia Enterprise platform rather than by scraping, so as not to severely tax its servers.⁠[24]

On December 9, 2025, the board appointed Bernadette Meehan as the foundation’s new CEO, effective January 20, 2026, with Iskander staying on until the handover. Meehan had served as US Ambassador to Chile from 2022 to 2025 and earlier as executive vice president for global programs at the Obama Foundation.⁠[25]

On January 15, 2026, Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, the foundation disclosed for the first time that over the past year it had formed partnerships with Amazon, MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, Mistral AI and Perplexity, now Wikimedia Enterprise customers; Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata, Nomic and Reef Media were also included.⁠[26]

As of October 2026 the foundation’s mission is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license; it is funded primarily through donations, has more than 700 staff and contractors, and its Board of Trustees is its ultimate corporate authority.⁠[27]

Wikimedia Foundation: Official website: https://wikimediafoundation.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[27]

Wikipedia: Official website: https://www.wikipedia.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[27]