Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501 nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best known as the hosting platform for Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, it also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.The Wikimedia Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida, by Jimmy Wales as a nonprofit way to fund Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other crowdsourced wiki projects that had until then been hosted by Bomis, Wales's for-profit company. The Foundation finances itself mainly through millions of small donations from Wikipedia readers, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia. These are complemented by grants from various tech companies and philanthropic organizations.