The Wikimedia Foundation was founded in 2003 as a non-profit charitable organization in the state of Florida. It has grown since then to support Wikimedia's many projects.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that supports and operates Wikipedia and the other free knowledge projects. All of the work is guided by the mission to share the sum of all knowledge with every person in the world. They keep the websites fast, secure, and available. They support the community of volunteers who contribute to the Wikimedia projects. They make free knowledge accessible wherever — on the phone or laptop, on a boat in the South Pacific, or in the hills of Nepal. They help bring new knowledge online, lower barriers to access, and make it easier for everyone to share what they know.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

Since its inception in 2001, Wikimedia’s most famous initiative – Wikipedia – has transformed the way the world obtains information. Free, multilingual, and edited by thousands of volunteers, it offers anyone with an Internet connection access to the largest and most up-to-date encyclopedia available today.

Wikipedia is built on the belief that information is not a for-profit commodity. It has created an open platform where people around the world can collectively share their knowledge: whereas the encyclopedias of the past were written by a minority of professionals, Wikipedia is available to be edited and reviewed by volunteers ranging in expertise and spanning geographical regions. The result is a database of peer-reviewed and accurate entries – some updated thousands of times.