Imagine a world in which every person has free access
to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
And we need your help.

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organization with the goal of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. Meeting this goal through the maintenance, development and distribution of free content, Wikimedia relies on public donations to run its wiki-based projects.

Wikimedia provides computing and network resources to create and distribute many reference works including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikisource and the Wikimedia Commons. The content of these projects is provided to the public free of charge.

How your donation will help

All of our sites are free from advertisements. Visitors are not charged to edit, read or use our content. We rely entirely on donations to fund our projects. Our unprecedented growth in traffic and content requires regular hardware updates to prevent outages without sacrificing functionality. Other outgoings include bandwidth costs, rackspace within a colocation center, purchase of Wikimedia's domain names, sponsorship of specific software development tasks, and, occasionally, travel expenses.

See Budget/2005 for our latest budget, which details where the money will go, and meta:Wikimedia servers/hardware orders for details of the hardware we ordered after our last fundraising drive.