In a nutshell, what is Wikipedia? And what's Wikimedia?

Wikipedia is the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia. It's online, free to use for any purpose, and free of advertising. Wikipedia contains more than 21 million volunteer-authored articles in over 282 languages, and is visited by more than 489 million people every month, making it one of the most popular sites in the world.

It is a collaborative creation that has been added to and edited by millions of people during the past ten years: anyone can edit it, at any time. It has become the largest collection of shared knowledge in human history. The people who support it are united by their love of learning, their intellectual curiosity, and their awareness that we know much more together, than any of us does alone.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. Together these sites are the fifth most visited web property in the world. The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA. You can review our letter of tax-exemption and our financial reports and annual filings.

Our mission is to empower a global volunteer community to collect and develop the world's knowledge and to make it available to everyone for free, for any purpose. We work together with anetwork of chapters in many different countries to achieve this goal.