At the start of 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation welcomed new leadership with the appointment of Bernadette Meehan as Chief Executive Officer. Bernadette joined the Foundation in January, bringing extensive international experience in diplomacy, public service, and global program leadership. Most recently, she served as U.S. Ambassador to Chile, and previously led global leadership initiatives at the Obama Foundation. Her career has been defined by a commitment to collaboration, public engagement, and strengthening institutions that serve the public good — an approach that aligns closely with Wikimedia’s mission to ensure free knowledge is available to everyone. Below, Bernadette shares her early reflections as CEO.
“In a digital world shaped by algorithms, profits, and self-interest, Wikipedia stands apart“
Bernadette Meehan
CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation
More than 340 edits every minute. More than 66 million articles. By any measure, Wikipedia is extraordinary. But its true power isn’t the information it holds — it’s the people who bring it to life.
People are at the heart of everything we do. Volunteers build and maintain each article with care and rigor, ensuring knowledge remains accurate, current, and trustworthy. Readers turn to Wikipedia every day in moments of curiosity and discovery, carrying that knowledge into classrooms, conversations, and communities. Donors make it all possible, powering the infrastructure, independence, and global reach of free knowledge.
When I joined the Wikimedia Foundation as CEO in January 2026, I began by listening. I’ve spoken with hundreds of volunteers, colleagues, donors, partners, and readers worldwide. I want to understand why they choose Wikipedia in a world with countless sources of information, and what they need from us to carry this shared work forward.
What I’ve heard is both sobering and energizing: Human knowledge has never been more essential, yet it is increasingly under threat. At the same time, there’s a strong sense of possibility and responsibility: a moment for Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects, and all who care about free knowledge, to collectively shape the next 25 years.
That belief is at the heart of this year’s annual report theme: “The People’s Knowledge, built by and for humans.”
You already know Wikipedia. In this report, we invite you to meet some of the people who bring it to life every day. You’ll follow the journey of a single article and see the curiosity, care, and collaboration of the many hands and perspectives that together shape the knowledge that informs and connects the world.
In a digital world shaped by algorithms, profits, and self-interest, Wikipedia stands apart: a truly grassroots endeavor guided by no agenda other than the passions and intellect hundreds of thousands of volunteers bring. This embodies curiosity, wonder, and a burning desire to get it right, using a collaborative model refined over the past 25 years to provide accurate, unbiased, and reliable information.
This is how knowledge should be created and shared: by humans, for humans. Grounded in reasoning and critical thinking, rigorously sourced, and shaped into a neutral point of view through discussion and thoughtful deliberation, not through rote repetition or mechanical reproduction.
Thank you for being part of this story — you are the volunteers, donors, and readers whose curiosity, care, and dedication bring Wikipedia and the world of Wikimedia projects to life.
With gratitude,
Bernadette
Bernadette Meehan
Wikimedia Foundation CEO
Knowledge projects as expansive, diverse, and accessible as the people
66 million
Wikipedia articles
300+
Languages on Wikipedia
135 million
freely usable media files on Wikimedia Commons
Every Wikipedia article tells a story about Wikipedia’s collaborative reach and impact. That’s 66 million stories. And 66 million narratives about people working together to add important knowledge to the world through Wikipedia. This is the story of a single Wikipedia article. This one article — a medical article on Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — exemplifies everything unique about Wikipedia, including the behind-the-scenes work that ensures Wikipedia is constantly evolving for the better.
The volunteers, donors, and readers you’ll meet in this report make Wikipedia’s knowledge human-centered. Wikipedia wouldn’t exist without them. A single Wikipedia article tells a universal story: that something powerful grows through the collective efforts of people who choose to give their time, trust, and support to something larger than themselves.
Wikipedia articles may seem anonymous at first. You won’t see a single byline or a contributor’s biography. That reflects something deeper: Wikipedia is built by people, for people, united by a shared purpose — to create knowledge that serves the world. It’s a reminder that even when names are hidden, human effort and care are at the heart of every article.
Audrey Effenberger edits Wikipedia because she values clear explanations of complex scientific ideas. With a background in neurobiology, she often contributes to articles on medicine and neurology, helping translate advanced research into language that both specialists and general readers can understand. She appreciates that even small edits on Wikipedia can make an article clearer and more useful for the many people who rely on it.
Audrey Effenberger is a neurobiologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, where she received her PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences. She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard College, USA where she studied neurobiology and mathematical sciences.
“I edit Wikipedia because I want to help build the best possible reference text that I would want to use in my own daily life. In my professional capacity, I want to use my expertise to create digestible summaries of advanced concepts that work as quick references for colleagues and accessible entry points for non-experts to begin learning about complex topics. I especially appreciate constructive edits of all sizes on neurology and medical articles — even a small copyedit that clarifies an important point of a sensitive topic can make a big difference for readers.”
Paul Wicks has spent years contributing to Wikipedia’s medical articles, including the page on ALS. Trained as a neuropsychologist and long involved in digital health research, he brings both professional knowledge and personal motivation to the work. After a close family member was diagnosed with ALS, improving the article became especially meaningful to him. His edits help ensure the information is clear, well sourced, and reliable for the many people who turn to Wikipedia when they first learn about the disease.
Paul Wicks is a neuropsychologist specializing in digital health who edits medical articles, including the ALS article, with a focus on evidence quality and clarity. He trained in treating patients with ALS and Parkinson’s disease at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where he received his PhD. As a researcher he studied the psychological consequences of the disease, including the profile of depression, anxiety, and cognitive changes in different subgroups. For over 20 years, he ran online communities connecting thousands of patients and caregivers to advance peer support, advocacy, and clinical research. Multiple worlds collided when a close family member was diagnosed with the disease in 2013 and he became a caregiver and advocate, too. In 2011 he was awarded MIT Technology Review’s TR35 “Humanitarian of the Year” award, and in 2012 he was recognized as a TED Fellow.
“Many people will be reading this article on the worst day of their lives. When someone is first diagnosed with ALS, Wikipedia is one of the first articles they and their family members will read. Increasingly, I suspect AI will come to rely on the carefully constructed articles there, too. Therefore it’s critical this information is accurate, well referenced, neutral, and up to date. Wikipedia is also a primary source for journalists, medical students, and policymakers, many of whom lack free access to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. And its readership is vast; I’ve met hundreds of families in my research career, but the ALS page is read 1.5 million times each year in English alone which is a scale unmatched by any other resource in the world. I would love to live in a world where every medical article is a “Good Article” and that incentives are in place for patients, researchers, clinicians, and nonprofits around the world to collaborate to make that happen.”
Ayokanmi is a Nigerian Wikipedia editor and community organizer who has spent years helping grow the Wikimedia movement in Nigeria. In addition to creating and improving articles, he mentors new contributors and helps organize programs that bring more people into the Wikimedia community. He is passionate about expanding representation and ensuring that Wikipedia reflects the knowledge and experiences of people everywhere.
Ayokanmi Oyeyemi is a Nigerian Wikipedia editor, community organizer, and open-knowledge advocate. He began contributing to Wikipedia in 2015 and has since been involved in article creation, article review, community development, mentorship, and program facilitation within the Wikimedia movement in Nigeria. Beyond editing, Ayokanmi has supported initiatives focused on youth mentorship, digital literacy, and online safety, helping to strengthen local communities and expand participation in free knowledge. He is deeply committed to improving the visibility and accuracy of African stories on the internet.
“I contribute to Wikipedia because knowledge should be free, inclusive, and reflective of everyone’s reality, especially communities that have historically been underrepresented online. Editing Wikipedia is my way of helping ensure that our stories are preserved and accessible to the world.”
Sandra is a Wikimedian in Kampala, Uganda, who contributes to Wikipedia while also working in communications, research, and policy. Her editing focuses on addressing gaps in representation, particularly around gender and technology. Through her writing and her work supporting other volunteers she sees each edit as a small but meaningful step toward a more inclusive record of knowledge.
Sandra Aceng is a Wikimedian, communications advisor, policy analyst, researcher, and expert on the intersection of gender and information and communication technologies (ICT). Based in Kampala, Uganda, she is an energetic human rights defender, recognized by the Ugandan human rights group DefendDefenders in 2021. She advocates for gender inclusion in ICT policy and raises concerns about threats to free expression in Africa caused by regulatory measures.
Sandra joined the Wikimedia ecosystem in 2018 and has led campaigns around Art+Feminism, WikiForHumanRights, Wiki for Refugees, and Wiki Loves Earth projects, focusing on skills, community norms, and best practices for Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, including championing copyright-related advocacy in Uganda and beyond. She has also contributed to other Wikimedia projects, such as WikiGap. She served on the core organizing team for Wikimania 2022, leading on communications and helping coordinate the Uganda-based component of the hybrid event.
In 2025, Sandra was nominated through the NominateHer Campaign by Africa Wiki Women as a woman making meaningful contributions to the Wikimedia movement in Uganda. Sandra holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.
“I contribute to Wikipedia because every edit is an act of justice, an opportunity to close knowledge gaps, document communities that have been left out of the public record, and ensure that women, refugees, and under‑represented voices are seen, heard, and valued globally.”
Peter is a biologist who enjoys the challenge of organizing complex scientific information so others can understand it. On Wikipedia, that often means adding new research or improving sections that connect different strands of knowledge. He even teaches Wikipedia editing to his students, encouraging them to see knowledge as something people build together, one careful contribution at a time.
Since 2011, Peter has been an associate professor in biology at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. Previously, he was associate investigator at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, USA. He has a PhD in molecular embryology from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.
“As scientists, we generate new knowledge, but we also have the responsibility to aggregate and evaluate it and Wikipedia is one great way to do that. Also, I enjoy putting pieces of information into a complex but easy-to-navigate body of knowledge — I even teach Wikipedia editing to my students. Editing Wikipedia is like solving a puzzle, the body of human knowledge, by adding one piece at a time.”
Rudolf began editing Wikipedia in 2020 after retiring from a career working on economic development across Latin America and the Caribbean. An enthusiastic user of Wikipedia as a research tool, he soon began contributing articles himself. His edits related to ALS were motivated by a personal connection: a family member living with a rare variant of the disease. Since then, he has continued creating and improving articles so readers can better understand complex medical topics.
Rudolf’s career spans over three decades and centers on economic development issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has performed economic research and delivered policy advice, capacity building, and training services — mostly as a United Nations staff member, in particular with its regional commission, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). He has worked across rural development, mining, and industry clusters, with a focus on productivity, competitiveness, innovation, and partnerships between public institutions, academia, and civil society. He has a Master’s degree in Development Economics from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands.
“I made an edit to that article, to introduce a wikilink to the article about Brachial amyotrophic diplegia, which I authored. Brachial amyotrophic diplegia is also called ‘Vulpian-Bernhardt Syndrome’ and ‘flail arm syndrome,’ which is how the link appears in the article. Brachial amyotrophic diplegia is usually considered to be a regional variant of ALS and did not have a stand-alone article. I am happy that my article on Brachial amyotrophic diplegia was well received, was expanded by other editors, and is in good shape. Indeed, I’ve edited Wikipedia since 2020, shortly after I retired from my job as a United Nations staff member. I found Wikipedia to be an extraordinary research tool and I am happy to contribute, both with new articles and with the maintenance of existing articles. A family member of mine has Brachial amyotrophic diplegia and that is why I felt the need to have a Wikipedia article on this rare variant of ALS.”
January 28, 2003
A contributor creates the beginnings of the article — not as an actual article but as a “redirect” page that takes users to the then-Wikipedia article about Motor Neuron Diseases. The Motor Neuron Diseases article was itself a work-in-progress, while the ALS page was now established for contributors to begin adding knowledge.
January 2, 2006
Three years later, the ALS article has the beginnings of being a real article. It now had six sections — including sections on “Symptoms,” “Diagnosis,” “Cause,” and “Treatment.” References and links to sources were still missing.
January 2, 2008
Two years later, hundreds of contributors have expanded the ALS article, with a bolstered “Epidemiology” section, and new sections on “Etymology,” “Etiology,” and “Prognosis.” The article now has 26 references, links to sources, and an “External Links” section for further reading from leading medical organisations in the field.
January 29, 2013
The ALS article is much more evolved with 60 references! It also has multiple sub-sections within sections — and its first image: an MRI of a brain. The article also has a “History” timeline that gives readers important context on the disease’s history.
January 29, 2018
The article has expanded even more — with a new “Management” section and a new section on “Society and Culture” that features a video of the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.” The number of references has grown to 111.
January 30, 2023
The article has evolved with the latest information about the disease — including knowledge about ALS’s onset and about the disease’s regional variants. The article now has 165 references, many with clickable links that let users look at the original source material.
January 29, 2025
Twenty-two years after the article’s creation, it’s classified as a “Good Article,” which are “well-written (articles), contain factually accurate and verifiable information, are broad in coverage, neutral in point of view, stable, and illustrated, where possible, by relevant images with suitable copyright licenses.” At the time, only 0.59% of English Wikipedia’s 6,946,867 articles were categorized as “Good.”
April 2026
The article now stands as a powerful example of what collective knowledge can achieve: It exists in 75 languages, connecting readers around the world to vital, life-changing information. Built through over 6,200 edits by a global community of contributors, the article continues to evolve with the latest research and understanding of the disease.
Knowledge from a Wikipedia article is more than a moment of insight. Its impact on people’s lives can last a lifetime. Over the past year, that impact was felt again and again, as readers explored billions of pages and learned about every subject imaginable. Whether seeking medical information, help with schoolwork, or updates on current events, Wikipedia was a trusted source for people — making a difference that many users described as “life-changing.”
Through WikiProject Medicine, medical professionals and highly trained contributors edit many of Wikipedia’s medical articles. That’s one reason Slate magazine — in a 2019 article headlined, “Why Wikipedia’s Medical Content Is Superior” — said, “It’s not only the general public that turns to Wikipedia for health content. More than 90 percent of medical students, and 50–70 percent of physicians, use the online encyclopedia as a source for health information.”
Nurses also turn to Wikipedia’s medical content, as noted by one who told us during the past year that, “I really appreciate the vetting and continued efforts to make sure information provided is as accurate as possible. I’ve seen growth throughout the years, especially pertaining to medical content. Keep up the good work!”
Wikipedia’s medical content is especially valuable during moments of intense global attention, such as the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when record numbers of people turned to Wikipedia for information. Rigorously sourced and neutrally written, Wikipedia’s knowledge filled a global void. In 2020, Wired magazine lauded Wikipedia for the thoroughness and accuracy of its medical articles, publishing a story headlined, “How Wikipedia Prevents the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation.”
Combatting misinformation is one of Wikipedia’s biggest strengths, particularly in medical topics, which are especially vulnerable to misinformation online. Medical professionals recognize this, and many contribute their expertise to ensure that Wikipedia articles remain accurate and well-sourced so that readers can trust the information they find.
Wikipedia reaches people in every corner of the world, and that’s why it’s notable that Wikipedia’s articles on Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are in 75 languages — including Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Ukrainian.
Some of the articles, such as the ALS article in Swahili, aren’t as detailed as the articles in Wikipedia languages that have wider pools of volunteer editors. That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation seeks to increase participation in diverse language communities around the world.
Through grants and other support, we help volunteer leaders with everything from recruiting new contributors to teaching new editors how to edit and perform other key tasks that sustain Wikipedia and our other projects. We’re also expanding our Abstract Wikipedia project, a long-term initiative designed to accelerate language equality across Wikipedia by transforming Wikipedias with small article bases into full-fledged knowledge sources.
The underlying technical infrastructure of Abstract Wikipedia is called “Wikifunctions,” and during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, we announced the first integration of Wikifunctions on Wikipedia, with Wikifunctions live on Dagbani Wikipedia. One of our five focus languages, Dagbani is a Niger-Congo language that’s spoken in northern Ghana and has about 3 million native speakers. Dagbani Wikipedia has more than 12,000 articles, and it’s written in a Latin-based alphabet.
So, the future of Wikipedia is happening right now. We envision a day when every ALS article on Wikipedia — including those in Dagbani and Swahili — matches the depth, sourcing, and impact of today’s English-language medical articles. Just last year, a Canadian woman shared that she used Wikipedia as “her base” to understand her autoimmune condition before going to medical journals — and that “it would have been hard to do without Wikipedia.” That’s the essence of Wikipedia’s global reach: knowledge that crosses languages, borders, and lives.
Donors help make impact possible. Every article on Wikipedia carries a promise made possible by the generosity of Wikipedia’s donors. It’s a commitment to a future where Wikipedia’s knowledge is freely available for everyone, everywhere. This partnership is more than just funding; it’s a shared commitment and responsibility. Donors support Wikimedia’s nonprofit operations and infrastructure that power every article, ensuring that millions of readers around the world can access reliable knowledge every day.
Over the lifetime of the ALS article, thousands of editors made thousands of edits, each one strengthening the article for Wikipedia’s global audience. In the past year, volunteer contributors continued to add new knowledge and refine existing content. At the same time, donors made that progress possible by sustaining the platform that enables this work to happen, ensuring that the ALS article and millions of others remain available, reliable, and continuously improving.
Collectively, Wikipedia’s articles are viewed billions of times each year, and their reach extends far beyond the site itself. Wikipedia is the trusted foundation that search engines, chatbots, and voice assistants rely on to relay information to people around the world. Every edit, every contribution, every donation amplifies this impact, ensuring that reliable knowledge reaches people at the moments they need it most.
For many donors, that impact is deeply meaningful. One described the “feeling of gratitude” that comes from supporting a resource that makes such a difference in people’s lives. Another shared that they “feel honored to contribute in a small way.” These reflections show a shared commitment to sustaining free, human, trusted knowledge for everyone.
Wikipedia provides general information and is not intended to offer medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. For medical concerns, please consult a qualified healthcare professional.
Progress is built quietly, collaboratively, and continually.
Knowledge projects created and stewarded by people for people
324
edits to Wikipedia every minute
250,000
volunteer editors of Wikipedia around the world
185
Wikimedia affiliates
Explore a dynamic map highlighting the experiences and contributions of Wikimedians worldwide.
A curator and numismatist, Lucy Moore has edited Wikipedia since 2019. Her strong sense of justice led her to start editing on gender-related topics and she mostly writes biographies about women. Editing Wikipedia, she says, has made her “a better person.”
Mary Mark Ockerbloom works with Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Her personal editing often focuses on craft artists such as “Jan Yager” or women in history such as “Marie Meyer (aviator).” Mary is also a Wikimedian-In-Residence who writes about science.
Robert Sim specializes in expanding coverage of Singapore-related topics on English Wikipedia. He’s also an administrator whose editing work is fundamental to Wikipedia’s ongoing knowledge expansion.
Konan has made over 19,000 edits across Wikimedia projects, and also reviews contributions as a patroller — an editing position that’s crucial for the Wikimedia projects.
Eugene Agbor Egbe has mentored over 1,000 aspiring and seasoned Wikimedia tech contributors, helping to spark long-term involvement across the African continent.
The photographer has uploaded more than 85,000 files to the Wikimedia projects, including 7,500 of her photos, which are now in over 4,000 locations across 134 language versions of Wikipedia.
Young contributors from around the world met and brainstormed key ways to grow their ranks on the Wikimedia projects.
Volunteers with the Wikimedistas de Bolivia team are uploading Quechua materials to Wikimedia Commons and doing other things that are making native languages more accessible.
She has been a prominent editor and organizer for nearly two decades across the Wikimedia projects, doing everything from becoming an administrator to being on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, which acts as a court of last resort for editing disputes.
By organizing a major storytelling event in Nigeria, the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group contributed to the broader Wikimedia movement’s mission to document and preserve local knowledge in oral and multimedia formats.
Thanks to the Iraqi Wikimedians User Group, a “Wikipedia for Youth” event in Baghdad inspired participants to get actively involved in Wikipedia. On display: Mentoring, contests, fun, and more!
A training in Yemen benefited teachers right away, and then promised to benefit those teachers’ students. The sessions also expanded Yemen’s Wikimedia community and promoted Yemeni culture through Wikipedia.
Butterflies dazzle in photos that are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Behind the camera: veteran Wikimedia contributors and people new to the field of butterfly documentation.
Wikimedia’s Indonesian chapter partnered with UNESCO on workshops for Wikimedia contributors to address harmful content, particularly misinformation and hate speech. The sessions were in the national language (Bahasa Indonesia) and nine indigenous languages.
At the Tokyo National Museum, septuagenarian contributor Yuriko Kadokura continued to add knowledge across Wikipedia — one article at a time.
Special meetup and edit-a-thon was dedicated to highlighting the contributions of African women in the Wikimedia movement. Many participants shared their stories of resilience, dedication, and commitment.
A top volunteer contributor from Kenya, Carol Mwaura says her background as a librarian prepared her well to participate in the Wikimedia projects. Besides editing, she helps organize events like Wikimania.
At a museum, volunteer editors “preserved” knowledge about landmarks lost to the Los Angeles wildfires that damaged or destroyed 16,000 structures and cherished spots.
In a remote part of Canada, a grandfather has become a prolific Wikipedia editor, with over 250,000 edits since 2005. His speciality: Articles related to Canada’s north.
Ahead of a seminal United Nations conference, researchers made 100 improvements to climate change content on Wikipedia, helping to address misinformation and raise public understanding about climate change.
For the first time, a regional Wikimedia conference was held in Central Asia. Participants came from Asia, Europe, and North America, and sessions were held in English, Russian, and Uzbek.
In a program called “Wikipedia for 55+,” Wikimedia Ukraine inspired older people to begin editing the encyclopedia.
New effort to translate 5,000 user interface messages made Wikipedia’s platform more user-friendly for native speakers of a language in Ghana.
The Cebuano language — one of the largest in the Philippines — has a new “WikiClub,” which gives volunteers a place to meet and partner as they contribute to the Cebuano Wikipedia.
Tulu, a Dravidian language spoken by millions of people in India, now has a home on Wikisource, a Wikimedia site that’s a library of free textual sources.
First-ever Bangla Wikiconference brings together volunteer contributors from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal to connect, share experiences, and improve their work on the Wikimedia projects.
On a Wikipedia language edition that’s incubating, an in-person training and edit-a-thon added articles about female artists from Northern Ghana’s Upper West Region.
Trainings and a workshop laid the foundation for a project that will help African library resources be interlinked with Wikipedia and Wikidata.
Through words and images, the International Roma Day edit-a-thon made Roma contributions to societies more visible across Wikipedia.
At the Montreux Jazz Archive, a volunteer contributor expanded Wikidata’s ability to cite female musicians who’ve performed at Switzerland’s famous jazz festival.
Edit-a-thon improves almost 100 Wikipedia articles about pioneering women in the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics.
Knowledge projects enjoyed and cherished by people
One of the
top 10
most visited websites
Nearly
15 billion
views on Wikipedia every month
As the largest source of shared knowledge in human history, and the most multilingual encyclopedia ever produced, Wikipedia is a resource that is always evolving. This includes continual improvements to MediaWiki, the technical platform that powers Wikipedia, enabling readers and contributors to access and edit more than 66 million articles across over 300 languages every day.
From Wikipedia’s beginning, we’ve helped users discover knowledge across the Wikimedia projects, as in the “blue links” that connect one article to another. Last year, our Product and Technology staff implemented a helpful new way for readers to see related knowledge: When you go to a Wikipedia article and click on the search bar, you now get three suggestions for similar articles.
No typing needed. No thinking about what you might want to read. Automatically, you get the three suggested articles that relate directly to the article you’re viewing. This gives you an immediate way to find more knowledge across Wikipedia. A previous example of this kind of work: A decade ago, we implemented “Hovercards” (also called “link previews”), which gives users a visual preview when you hover over an article’s blue link. By introducing Hovercards, readers no longer needed to click the link to find out exactly what the article is about.
We know that users’ internet habits have changed in the past decade — and even in the past year as new AI tools have emerged and people have access to more ways to search for information. That’s why we’re now helping readers discover related content before they begin typing a search query. In the search bar on Wikipedia, in addition to the three suggested articles that appear, users will also see “type-ahead search suggestions,” real-time suggestions that appear as you type, predicting what you might be looking for and surfacing relevant articles before you complete your search. We created these “type-ahead search suggestions” soon after we introduced Hovercards, and we’ve improved their functionality since then — another example of the continuing work that we’re doing to help you discover knowledge that interests you, whether it’s a medical article or something else entirely.
Volunteer contributors add the knowledge on Wikipedia, and they live in almost every country of the world, numbering more than 250,000. While many contributors have user pages with their biographical information, edits, and even how to contact them, a significant number of contributors make edits from countries where it can be dangerous to contribute knowledge on topics like politics or historic events. Understandably, some editors don’t want to reveal their real names or IP addresses, which can identify their approximate location, including country, city, and even a postal code.
That’s why we deployed “temporary accounts” last year across nearly every Wikipedia language edition. This protects the privacy of editors who are editing Wikipedia without a Wikimedia account or without logging in, and helps them contribute knowledge without fear of reprisal for their volunteer work on Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia’s beginning, IP addresses have played a major part in the protection of Wikipedia’s knowledge. They allow users to fight vandalism, abuse, and other disruptive behavior across our projects. But changing laws and regulation around internet privacy created urgency for the Wikimedia projects to protect personal data more strongly — which is what “temporary accounts” are doing. No longer are editors’ IP addresses publicly available. Protecting editors has always been of paramount importance. As the internet changes, we’re adapting ways to protect editors and their ability to continue expanding Wikipedia’s knowledge base without fear of reprisals.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Site Reliability Engineering team ensures that Wikipedia and its sister projects are always available, rapidly and securely, so that you can find knowledge when you need it. The team does this by managing and monitoring our global network of data centers and other core infrastructure.
Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50 percent — an increase that’s not coming from human readers but largely from automated programs that scrape our Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans searching Wikipedia in moments of breaking news, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots was unprecedented and significantly increased Foundation costs and staff time.
While human readers tend to focus on specific, often similar topics, crawler bots tend to “bulk read” larger numbers of pages and visit the less popular pages. This means these types of requests are more likely to get forwarded to our core datacenter rather than the “cache” datacenter that’s closest to the user — which makes it much more expensive in terms of consumption of our resources.
To help mitigate these issues, we updated our bot detection systems this past year to better manage the increase in AI scrapers, including those that tried to appear human and evade detection. Our content is free but our infrastructure is not, and our actions this past year were designed to establish responsible use of our infrastructure and dedicate our engineering resources to supporting and prioritizing our human users and their access to knowledge.
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Accountability and transparency are core values of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are committed to stewarding funds and resources responsibly so that every contribution advances our mission of expanding access to knowledge for all.
In recognition of this commitment, we have earned the Platinum Seal of Transparency from Candid, formerly known as GuideStar. Charity Navigator has awarded us its highest rating of four stars and its highest score of 100 percent.
99/100
Nearly half of our budget goes toward supporting the technology that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We are constantly working to enhance the user experience for both contributors and readers, improve site security, and ensure reliable access to our websites globally. This infrastructure and product support sustain one of the top ten most visited websites in the world, all at a fraction of the cost of popular for-profit websites.
The global reach of Wikimedia projects is made possible by the hard work of volunteers from across the globe. We provide grants, legal support, and other resources to help build vibrant volunteer communities. Additionally, we promote community engagement through outreach initiatives and advocate for the growth and protection of free knowledge.
Operational costs are essential for the smooth management and governance of the Wikimedia Foundation. These expenses help us recruit top talent and support staff around the world, empowering them to carry out the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Donor support is crucial to sustaining Wikipedia and our other free knowledge endeavors. Our team is committed to efficient and effective fundraising throughout the year, ensuring that every contribution helps advance our mission.
| Current assets | 2025 (USD) | 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Cash and cash equivalents | 72,028,717 | 82,845,159 |
| Contributions receivable | 1,549,588 | 1,571,657 |
| Short-term investments | 213,347,452 | 183,365,987 |
| Prepaid expenses and other current assets | 9,220,899 | 5,722,457 |
| Restricted cash | 503,336 | 1,428,542 |
| Right of use asset — operating lease, net | 530,951 | — |
| Property and equipment, net | 13,613,474 | 11,826,136 |
| Total assets | 310,794,417 | 286,759,938 |
| Current liabilities | 2025 (USD) | 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts payable | 4,526,233 | 4,009,582 |
| Accrued expenses | 7,435,319 | 7,959,558 |
| Deferred revenue | 1,298,333 | 2,128,750 |
| Lease liability | 633,001 | 417,756 |
| Donations payable to Wikimedia Endowment | 187,674 | 525,607 |
| Other liabilities | 163,827 | 163,295 |
| Total liabilities | 14,244,387 | 15,204,548 |
| Net assets | 2025 (USD) | 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Net assets without donor restrictions | 292,735,030 | 265,859,067 |
| Net assets with donor restrictions | 3,815,030 | 5,696,323 |
| Total net assets | 296,550,030 | 271,555,390 |
| Total liabilities and net assets | 310,794,417 | 286,759,938 |
| Support and revenue | 2025 (USD) | 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Contributions of cash and other financial assets | 184,053,816 | 168,212,977 |
| Contributions of nonfinancial assets and services | 1,775,001 | 263,476 |
| Wikimedia Enterprise revenue from contracts | 8,297,917 | 3,351,250 |
| Foreign currency gains (losses) | (146,531) | (300,907) |
| Other income, net | 2,323,435 | 2,278,523 |
| Investment income (loss), net | 6,862,192 | 5,096,842 |
| Release of net assets with donor restrictions | 5,401,323 | 6,481,350 |
| Total support and revenue | 208,567,153 | 185,383,511 |
| Expenses | 2025 (USD) | 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Salaries and benefits | 114,039,077 | 106,793,960 |
| Awards and grants | 28,737,437 | 26,820,080 |
| Internet hosting | 3,474,785 | 3,116,445 |
| In-kind service expenses | 1,775,001 | 263,476 |
| Donation processing expenses | 8,252,081 | 7,547,718 |
| Professional service expenses | 15,904,262 | 13,090,040 |
| Other operating expenses | 7,683,682 | 10,798,140 |
| Travel and conferences | 6,478,914 | 5,824,979 |
| Depreciation and amortization | 4,592,768 | 4,216,271 |
| Total expenses | 190,938,007 | 178,471,109 |
| Net assets with donor restrictions | 2025 (USD) | 2024 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Contributions with donor restrictions | 3,520,000 | 6,295,000 |
| Net assets released from restrictions | (5,401,323) | (6,481,350) |
| Increase (decrease) in net assets with donor restrictions | 3,815,000 | (186,350) |
| Increase in net assets | 24,994,640 | 16,584,053 |
| 2024 (USD) | 2023 (USD) | |
|---|---|---|
| Net assets at beginning of year | 271,555,390 | 254,971,337 |
| Net assets at end of year | 296,550,030 | 271,555,390 |
The Wikimedia Foundation’s leadership includes the executive team, which oversees staff at the Foundation, and the Board of Trustees, which serves as the Foundation’s ultimate corporate authority, guiding its work and mission.
Chair, Board of Trustees
Nataliia grew up in Western Ukraine and has a Masters degree in Public Administration and a Specialist degree in Records Management and Information Activities. She has in-depth experience in executive leadership and financial management.
Since 2005, she has worked in various commercial enterprises as the head of the personnel department, executive director, chief accountant. From 2006 to 2007, she worked as the head of the educational and methodical department of the Ivano-Frankivsk regional center for retraining and advanced training of employees of public authorities, local governments, state enterprises, institutions and organizations. Since 2010, she has worked as a financial manager and later as a financial director of the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM), a Ukrainian media policy and human rights nonprofit (formerly Media Law Institute). After 2018 she joined the Supervisory Board of CEDEM.
On the Wikimedia projects, Nataliia has been an active contributor since 2011, and shortly after became an administrator of Ukrainian Wikipedia.
In late 2012, Nataliia joined the Board of Wikimedia Ukraine as Treasurer. In this position, Nataliia built the financial model for the chapter from the ground up, including detailed financial reporting, accounting, and grant-making activities for the organization. Nataliia was later selected to serve as volunteer Executive Director of Wikimedia Ukraine in 2013 in addition to her position on the Board. In 2015, she returned to her position as Vice Chair and Treasurer of the Board.
Throughout her time on the Board, Nataliia helped oversee the growth and expansion of Wikimedia Ukraine in a number of ways, including improvements in transparency and governance-related processes for the chapter, the transition to Annual Plan Grants (APG) funding, growing Wikimedia Ukraine staff, and building and maintaining donor, partner, and community relationships.
Since 2016, she has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and since 2019 she has been the Deputy Chairperson of the Board. Nataliia became the chair of the Board of Trustees in 2021.
Vice Chair, Board of Trustees
Esra’a Al Shafei is a human rights activist and the founder and director of Majal, a nonprofit which helps build communities that celebrate, protect, and promote diversity, and social justice.
A native of Bahrain, Esra’a works avidly to increase and protect free speech, promote expression for youth and underrepresented voices, and improve the lives of LGBTQ people in the Middle East and North Africa. She founded Majal in 2006 as Mideast Youth. The organization has built online platforms that creatively facilitate the struggle for social change in the Middle East and North Africa.
Esra’a received the Berkman Award for Internet Innovation from Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in 2008 for “outstanding contributions to the internet and its impact on society.” The World Economic Forum listed her as one of “15 Women Changing the World in 2015.”
She has won the “Most Courageous Media” Prize from Free Press Unlimited, and the Monaco Media Prize, which acknowledges innovative uses of media for the betterment of humanity.
Esra’a is a senior TED Fellow, an Echoing Green fellow, and a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. She received a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship in 2012 for her work on CrowdVoice.org. She lives in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Luis’ passion for technology began at an early age when his father placed him in a BASIC programming course as an 8-year-old in Brazil. That passion only grew with time, leading him to graduate with Honors in Computer Engineering and kick starting his career. Fast forwarding to today, Luis is now the father of the smartest, and just as tech savvy, 6-year-old boy and always on the lookout for the nearest dog park.
Today, Luis is based in São Paulo, Brazil, operating as the Chief Technology Officer at Loft, where he leads Engineering, Product, Data and Design at the proptech startup helping Latin Americans achieve the dream of home ownership at this top funded startup in the region. Luis is also actively involved as an Advisor and Investor supporting exciting LatAm companies.
Prior to Loft, Luis was based in Colombia as the Chief Product Officer at Rappi, a unicorn startup in Latin America. It was Rappi’s drive to improve the quality of life in LatAm, coupled with Luis’ deep interest in the tech scene in the region, that led him to make the move back from Silicon Valley.
Before returning to LatAm, Luis was the Founder, CTO and Board Director at Novi Money. Luis was also a senior leader in the engineering and executive teams at Reddit, Microsoft and Workpop. While at Reddit, Luis led the Reddit Knowledge Group, which owned all things related to data, machine learning, spam/abuse protection and search. He was deeply involved in Reddit’s growth stage, coordinating closely with Reddit’s communities in that evolution.
Luis is always looking for opportunities to travel; fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish he can often be found taking full advantage of his Brazilian, American and Italian passports to experience as many cultures and places as possible.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Kathy Collins has had a long career in the non-profit sector, working as a financial expert in both higher education and government. In September 2022, Kathy retired after 17 years as Vice President of Finance at Rice University, where her responsibilities included budget, controller’s office, internal audit, compliance and enterprise risk management, and institutional research. She was the Budget Director at Rice from 1995-2005. Kathy spent her early career with the Illinois Bureau of the Budget and with the federal government as a budget analyst with the Office of Management & Budget, Executive Office of The President and then as Budget Director at the US Department of Transportation. She received a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and a Master’s Degree in City Planning from Harvard University.
Kathy recently completed two terms as a trustee at Mount Holyoke College (2013-2023), where she was most recently Vice Chair of the Board, Chair of the Finance Committee and member of the Audit, Governance and Development Committees and the DEI Task Force. She is currently on the Board of Directors of Girls on the Run, Greater Houston and a member of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service President’s Council. Kathy will soon be joining the Board of Regents of Texas Lutheran University.
Kathy volunteers in Houston with the Christian Community Service Center’s JobNet to help job-hunters with resumes and interview skills, and with United Way Greater Houston’s financial oversight group to review the financial health and governance of United Way partner agencies.
Kathy and her husband Bill Mintz live in Houston, Texas.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Dr. Victoria Doronina is a Technical Officer at the Faculty of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.
Originally from Belarus, Victoria was awarded a Darwin Trust Fellowship, leading to a PhD in Molecular Biology (University of Edinburgh, UK). After graduating, Victoria worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in several Russell Group (UK Ivy league) universities specialising in protein translation. She is also an Associate Member of the Advance Higher Education Academy.
Victoria started contributing to Russian Wikipedia in 2006 and became an administrator. The second woman ever to be elected and the first to serve twice on the Russian Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, Victoria is a long-standing mediator in a few of the most debated topics and a Featured and Good articles moderator. In fact, Victoria was one of the initiators of the in-project mediation system.
In 2011 Victoria became a Wikimedia Community Fellow. She was involved in the initial stages of setting up the Russian Wikimedia chapter, Wikimedia.RU. She also served on the Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee.
Victoria is an award-winning freelance science writer. She is a regular contributor in the biology professionals hub BiteSizeBio. Victoria’s writing has appeared in the Careers supplement of Science, The Scientist, Argumenty i Fakty (Belarus), and Moskovskij Komsosmolets (Russia). She is active in promoting the Wikimedia movement on social media and as a spokesperson for Russian and English media.
Vice Chair, Board of Trustees
Dr. Shani Evenstein Sigalov is an educator specializing in technology & learning, researcher, lecturer, and free knowledge advocate. Her research explores the intersection of Education, Technology, Innovation and Openness, with a special interest in bridging gender, language and social gaps in free knowledge projects.
As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Shani has led a variety of research projects: Exploring Generative AI (GenAI) adoption in Israeli academia via an online learning community; Examining organizational response to GenAI, focusing on the case study of the Wikimedia Movement, in partnership with the University of Cambridge; Researching the effect of Linked Open Data in Digital Humanities with the Center for AI & Data Science at Tel Aviv University; and exploring the new phenomenon of Critical Ignoring in the context of Digital Curation. She also engaged in designing a chatbot for 5th-8th graders, aimed at developing students’ Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) and Problem-Solving (PS) skills, funded by the Ministry of Education. Shani is also investigating GenAI’s effect on knowledge consumption and production, with the Digital Humanities Research Hub (DHRH), University of London, where she serves as a Visiting Research Fellowship. Her PhD, chosen for funding by the Azrieli Foundation’s Research Fellows Program, explored the Semantic Web as a learning platform, focusing on Wikidata, a Linked Open Data (LOD) database accessible to humans and machines.
As part of her work at Tel Aviv University, she served as an EdTech Innovation Strategist at the School of Medicine for a decade, and since 2013 has been a lecturer in various courses on campus, designing and leading academic courses focusing on Wikimedia projects, Users engagement in online environment, and most recently, on Generative AI. In 2013 she opened the first for-credit course in the world focusing on medical content on Wikimedia projects, with her students contributing over 13% of Hebrew Wikipedia’s medical content. In 2015 she opened a second academic course focusing on using Wikipedia as a platform to gain skills and have social impact, available to all undergraduates at TAU, and in 2018 she opened the first academic course in the world to feature Wikidata. Content created via her academic courses over the past decade has gained 75 million page views, demonstrating a positive social impact.
Shani is currently serving her second term as a Wikimedia Foundation Trustee, and has completed a 3 years term as the Board’s Vice Chair. During her first term, she founded and served as the Chair of the Community Affairs Committee – a Board committee designed to strengthen the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia communities in working toward the joint mission and vision of the Wikimedia movement. She is also an active member of the Product & Technology Committee since its inception, and a member of the Governance Committee. Among other board roles, she served as Board Liaison to the Affiliations Committee (AffCom) and the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC), and was the Chair of the ad-hoc Brand Committee. Prior to joining the Board of Trustees, Shani served as the Chairperson for both Wikimedia Medicine and Wikipedia & Education User Group. She is also a founding member of the Wikipedia & Libraries User Group, and a former board member of Wikimedia Israel. Besides contributing to Wikimedia projects, Shani also serves as Chief Editor and Chairperson for Project Ben-Yehuda, a free online library of Hebrew writings, and a Board member of the Public Knowledge Workshop (Hasadna).
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Dr. Dariusz Jemielniak is a full professor of management and organization studies, the head of MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies) department at Kozminski University, and associate faculty at Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Originally from Warsaw, Poland, Dariusz studies open collaboration communities, the phenomenon of organized sharing (including piracy), and anti-scientific movements. He has conducted research projects on related issues at Cornell University, Harvard University, Berkeley, and MIT. In 2014, he published Common knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia at Stanford University Press, and in 2019, he published Collaborative Society with MIT Press (co-authored by A. Przegalinska). He has been the recipient of many academic merit awards, including a Fulbright Foundation scholarship (2004), Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship (2015) and Polish Academy of Sciences Chair award for outstanding scholarship (2016).
Dariusz currently serves on the board of Copernicus Science Center, as well as vice-chair of the board of Escola, a public Polish company focused on mobile app development. Previously, he was a chairperson of the Collegium Invisibile academic society (OSI initiative). He was a scientific advisor to the Ministry of Science in Poland from 2015-2016, and currently serves on the steering committee of Internet Governance Forum in Poland.
He developed and sold three startups, including ling.pl, the largest Polish online dictionary, and is a co-founder of Insta.Ling, a free platform for vocabulary acquisition.
Dariusz has held a variety of different roles on Wikipedia, including administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, steward, and ombudsman. He served as the chair of Wikimedia’s Funds Dissemination Committee for three terms.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Lorenzo Losa has been deeply involved in Wikimedia projects since he began editing Wikipedia in 2004. Since then, he has made over 1 million edits across different projects and filled a number of volunteer roles including Italian Wikipedia administrator, bot operator, and OTRS volunteer.
Lorenzo joined the board of Wikimedia Italia in 2011 and served as its president from 2016–2020. He served on the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) as a community-elected member (2015-2019). He joined the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in December 2021.
Originally from Milan, Italy, Lorenzo earned a Masters degree in Mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore. He currently leads the development of an electronic brokerage platform.
Lorenzo is fluent in Italian, Spanish, and English.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Raju Narisetti’s current role as Publisher of McKinsey Global Publishing at McKinsey & Company is the latest in a 32-year global career in media and publishing, during which he has created, reimagined, and managed major media organizations in North America, Europe and Asia, as well as being on the frontlines of digital transformation challenges and new ventures in publishing.
Raju worked as a journalist at The Wall Street Journal where, over 14 years, he went from a Reporting Intern to be the Editor of WSJ Europe, and Managing Editor, Digital, of the global WSJ, and part of a team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for 9/11 coverage. At The Washington Post, Raju was the Managing Editor who helped kick-start the newspaper’s print/digital transformation. In both WSJ and Washington Post, Raju was the youngest and first Person of Color on their mastheads. Raju is also the founder of Mint (livemint.com), India’s English language business news publication.
After his journalist stint, as a media business executive, he was Senior Vice President of Strategy for News Corp, and then CEO of the Gizmodo Media Group, which then encompassed a group of digital journalism sites that included Gizmodo, Jezebel, DeadSpin, Lifehacker, and The Root.
Prior to joining McKinsey in 2020, he was a journalism educator, leading the Knight Bagehot Fellowships in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University, where he also was a Professor of Professional Practice at the School of Journalism.
An alumni member of the WEF’s Young Global Leader cohort (YGL Class of 2007), he is currently on the board of Friends of the Forum Foundations USA Inc., which provides oversight for funding support for YGL and Global Shapers initiatives at the World Economic Forum.
He lives in New York City but is often found on Twitter @Raju.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
A volunteer editor since 2005, Mike Peel has been involved in many facets of the Wikimedia movement. He is an administrator on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and the English Wikipedia. He co-founded Wikimedia UK and served as a trustee there for five years. He is also a member of Wiki Movimento Brasil and Wikimedia España. He served on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Funds Dissemination Committee for four years, and for the last year he was a member of a Northern and Western Europe Regional Grants Committee.
Mike earned his PhD in radio astronomy at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in England before relocating to the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil in 2016 to work on a new telescope, BINGO. His work then landed him at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in the Canary Islands, where he took part in the GroundBIRD and QUIJOTE experiments. Throughout his global professional experience, Mike has regularly worked with scientists and students from all backgrounds. He has supported multilingual knowledge creation through Wikidata, where he developed the multilingual Wikidata infobox that is now used in over four million Commons categories. Mike hopes to bring these perspectives to his work as a trustee to help Wikimedia grow in regions where it has historically been undersupported.
Mike’s first committee assignments will be as a member of the Community Affairs Committee and an alternate to the Audit and Product & Technology Committees.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is a Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University (Boston). She has a degree in Business Management, a Master’s degree in Business Administration, and a graduate certificate in Executive Leadership. In 2016, she retired from a career as an administrator in the healthcare and government sectors, where she specialized in project management, contract management, and talent acquisition. For several years, she also served as an Adjunct Professor.
Rosie started editing English Wikipedia in 2007 and became an administrator in 2009. She has created more than 5,000 new articles, including more than 1,500 biographies about notable women. In 2014, she founded WikiProject Women Writers. In 2015, she co-founded Wiki Women in Red, an international, multi-language initiative focused on increasing the quantity and quality of Wikipedia articles related to women. A year later, Women in Red was shortlisted for the ITU/UN Women GEM-TECH Award for its efforts to apply technology for women’s empowerment and digital inclusion. Rosie was honored as co-Wikimedian of the Year 2016 for her work related to combating harassment on Wikipedia and increasing its coverage of notable women. In 2018, she was knighted in Serbia, her ancestors’ homeland, in part because of her Wikipedia work. A Hoosier by birth, she lives in California.
Trustee, Board of Trustees
Jimmy Wales is an Internet entrepreneur and wiki enthusiast, and founder of the Wikipedia project.
Jimmy was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1966, and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in Chicago. In the mid-1990s he started Bomis, a search portal focusing on aspects of pop culture, one of the first users of the freely licensed data of the Open Directory Project.
In 1999, Jimmy had the concept of a freely distributable encyclopedia and founded Nupedia, by hiring philosopher Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief and assigning two programmers to write software for it. Nupedia failed, perhaps due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. After two years of working with the Nupedia concept, that team opened Wikipedia to help channel content into Nupedia; Wikipedia became an instant success, but not in the envisioned way, and Nupedia was shut down. In 2003, Jimmy set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its sister projects.
In 2004, Jimmy founded Wikia. He was appointed a fellow of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in mid-2005, and in October of 2005 joined the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses.
Chief Executive Officer, Executive Team
Maryana Iskander was the Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Prior to Wikimedia, Maryana spent ten years as the CEO of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, a non-profit social enterprise focused on building African solutions to tackle the global crisis of youth unemployment. Under her leadership, Harambee received the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2019 for its model to support millions of South African youth with access to learning and earning opportunities.
Maryana has dedicated her career to breaking down systemic barriers of access to opportunity and education. She has a proven track record for scaling complex organizations through collaborative solution-building and community empowerment. She spent more than half a decade as the Chief Operating Officer of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She was also the Advisor to the President of Rice University, an associate at global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Maryana holds a BA magna cum laude from Rice University, an M.Sc. from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she received a Distinguished Alumna Award. Maryana is also a Truman Scholar, a Henry Crown Fellow, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Maryana also serves as a Trustee of the Yale University Corporation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Co-Impact, a global philanthropic collective.
Chief Product and Technology Officer, Executive Team
Selena Deckelmann is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. She brings more than 20 years of experience in open source technology, product management and engineering leadership.
Previously, Selena was Senior Vice President at Mozilla, where she led a team of 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s greatest achievements including infrastructure projects like Quantum Flow and Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking Protection, and services such as Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various other roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior Director for Web Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and Senior Manager for Gecko Security Engineering.
Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as co-founder of Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that explored how to improve business processes at scale with checklist automation software, and as Consulting Director of Development for The Ada Initiative, an organization dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities. She is a Python Foundation Fellow and former Major Contributor to PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world. Since 2018, she has been a member of the Oregon Sunshine Committee, an initiative focused on expanding public access to government information in her home state of Oregon.
Selena graduated from the University of Oregon. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.
Chief Advancement Officer and Deputy to the Chief Executive Officer, Executive Team
Lisa Seitz Gruwell is the Chief Advancement Officer and Deputy to the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Lisa’s role includes leading the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising activities across a broad and varied spectrum that includes both individual donors and philanthropic institutions, as well as a focus on community growth and partnerships. In 2016, she helped launch the Wikimedia Endowment and serves as its President.
Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation in 2011, Lisa previously worked as Chief Operating Officer at the Rappaport Family Foundation and Skyline Public Works, a fund that blends venture capital with philanthropy; as the District Director and Press Secretary for the California Assembly Majority Leader and in several roles for then-mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom. She also has previously worked as a political consultant and campaign manager for Democratic candidates in California, Montana, Michigan, Connecticut and Oregon. Lisa was also appointed to serve as a Civil Service Commissioner for the City and County of San Francisco. In addition, Lisa has served as a board member of several organizations including the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Progressive States Network, and the San Francisco Rock Project.
Lisa earned a bachelor’s degree in Public Relations and Political Science from Carroll College. She studied as a Coro Fellow before attending the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Center for Social Innovation in the Executive Program for Philanthropy Leaders.
General Counsel, Executive Team
Stephen LaPorte is the General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and the Wikimedia free knowledge projects.
Stephen began at the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012, and he has held several leadership roles in the Foundation’s Legal department, most recently as the Deputy General Counsel covering a range of legal issues including copyright, trademarks, governance, and public policy. In his past roles he has led several high profile initiatives to protect access to knowledge and defend the rights of the hundreds of thousands of volunteer contributors that edit Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.
Stephen is also an active contributor to Wikipedia, Wikisource, and free software projects. His open source projects include interactive, real time, visualizations of collaboration on Wikipedia, including co-creating Listen to Wikipedia and a weekly newsletter of the most edited articles on Wikipedia.
Stephen received his BA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and his JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Chief Financial Officer, Executive Team
Jaime Villagomez is the Chief Financial Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation overseeing strategic planning and budgeting and financial and administrative operations for the organization since February 2016.
Originally from San Francisco, Jaime provides a deep, international business experience from working around the world, including in Latin America, Europe and Asia. Prior to joining Wikimedia, he was the Chief Financial Officer at San Francisco Bay Area-based software company anyCOMM Corporation and the Karum Group; as Vice-president, Finance, at Advent Software and QRS Corporation; and as Vice-president and Controller at Northpoint Communications.
Jaime obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Stanford and an MBA from University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School.
Chief Communications Officer, Executive Team
Anusha Alikhan is the Chief Communications Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Anusha has more than 15 years of communications experience spanning the areas of human rights, technology, knowledge access, international development, media innovation, gender equity, and healthcare. She joined the Foundation in 2019 as the Senior Director of Communications.
In her role leading the Communications department, she leads strategy to advance understanding of Wikimedia projects, and the Foundation’s values and social good mission, across external, internal and community audiences.
Previously, she was communications director for Knight Foundation, where she worked across the foundation’s focus areas – journalism, communities, arts, learning – as a thought partner and strategy developer. Before that, she served as a communications officer with the United Nations in New York contributing to the advancement of global peacekeeping initiatives, as well as a communications consultant with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). She was also marketing manager for the National Parkinson Foundation, where she developed brand awareness campaigns and promotional strategies that helped increase community impact and program results. She has worked as a freelance journalist and editor.
Before embarking on a professional career in communications, Anusha practiced employment and human rights law in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. She is now based in Miami.
Anusha serves on the board of The Communications Network and Awesome Foundation Miami and is a member of the Communications Network working group for diversity, equity and inclusion. She has a master’s degree in journalism from New York University, a law degree from Queen’s University in Ontario and an honors bachelor of arts from the University of Toronto.
Chief Talent and Culture Officer, Executive Team
Courtney Bass Sherizen is the Chief People Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Prior to joining Wikimedia, Courtney was a Director of People Operations at Google. While at Google, Courtney created the Global HR Crisis Management Office and was a Lead People Partner, coaching and advising over 100 senior leaders across the organization.
Courtney began her career as an 11th grade English teacher with Teach For America in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following that, she founded a travel consultancy in Beijing and, in her spare time, had acting roles in Chinese soap operas. Courtney has also supported leaders in both for-profit and not-for-profit sectors as a management consultant for Monitor Deloitte. Her work centered in developing strategies for a major US health insurer, a global consumer goods organization, a defense arm of the US government and a national non-profit.
Courtney holds a B.A. in History from Harvard College. In college, she received a certificate in African Studies and was selected as her graduating Class Day speaker. She also has a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a Certificate in Organizational Leadership and Coaching from Northwestern University. Courtney sits on the Board of Directors of the Donors of Color Network and Beta Financial Services.
Succeeded Maryana Iskander as Chief Executive Officer in January 2026, Executive Team
Bernadette Meehan is a global executive and former U.S. ambassador with deep experience leading complex organizations, navigating global policy challenges, building cross-sector partnerships, and driving innovation. She brings over two decades of leadership in geopolitics, technology, philanthropy, and global markets.
As U.S. Ambassador to Chile from 2022–2025, Bernadette advanced digital infrastructure and technology partnerships critical to global competitiveness. She played a pivotal role enabling Google’s investment in the Humboldt Cable, the first subsea cable linking South America with Asia, a project poised to transform digital connectivity. She secured ratification of a long-pending Bilateral Tax Treaty and negotiated agreements to expand access for U.S. agricultural exports. Her advocacy for international scientific cooperation, particularly in astronomy and Antarctic research, strengthened U.S. leadership in frontier science.
Previously, Bernadette served as Executive Vice President of Global Programs and a member of the Executive Committee of the Obama Foundation. She designed leadership development programs across Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe, establishing the foundation’s international presence and cultivating a worldwide network of emerging innovators, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders.
Bernadette’s commitment to public service was shaped over more than a decade as a career Foreign Service Officer, serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations. At the White House National Security Council (NSC) she held several senior roles, including Special Assistant to the President & NSC Spokesperson. Additional diplomatic assignments included Special Assistant to the Secretary of State; postings in the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Colombia; and resident fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. In 2007 the Department of State recognized her as one of its most promising future leaders, and she is the recipient of numerous performance awards.
Bernadette began her career in the private sector as a Vice President at J.P. Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers, building a foundation in global markets, financial strategy, and technology.
Her civic leadership includes prior service on the Board of Advisors at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and the Advisory Council of Hostage US. Bernadette holds a Bachelor of Arts from Boston College and speaks Spanish and Arabic. She is married and the mother of a young daughter.
Diana Strassmann, Anne Chao, and Winnie Scheuer all live in Houston, Texas, USA. They share a love of Wikipedia and its ability to offer knowledge that’s free of misinformation, commercial influence, and language barriers. That’s why Diana, Anne, and Winnie have supported the Wikimedia Foundation with donations and with something just as important: their time.
Merciधन्यवादGraciasありがとうشكراًDankeAsanteշնորհակալությունThank you!
In every language of the world, we offer our deepest thanks to our donors. Your unwavering support and generosity drive our mission and create a meaningful impact on a global scale.
We would like to offer special recognition to those who made significant contributions during the fiscal year 2024-2025. Your exceptional generosity has been vital in sustaining our projects and initiatives.
To every benefactor: You are an essential part of our community, and your dedication to advancing the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission is truly inspiring. Together, we are building a world where knowledge knows no bounds, allowing people from all backgrounds to benefit from the wealth of information provided by Wikimedia projects. Your support empowers us to continue our journey toward a more knowledgeable, connected, and equitable society.
Below is a list celebrating those who gave $1,000 or more during the past year:
The Wikimedia Endowment is a permanent fund created to protect the future of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Through the generosity of donors and long-term investment, the Endowment helps ensure that free, human-led knowledge remains independent, reliable, and accessible for generations to come. Explore how the Endowment is sustaining the power of knowledge in the Wikimedia Endowment 2024–2025 Annual Report.
Giving for today
Making a gift today is the simplest way to ensure that Wikipedia remains strong, stable, and always there when you need it.
Giving for tomorrow
The Wikimedia Endowment ensures Wikipedia thrives for generations to come. By including Wikipedia in your will, trust, retirement account, or other estate planning vehicle, you can help ensure the future of free and accessible knowledge. To learn more, email legacy@wikimedia.org or explore other ways to give.
Feel free to download this report as a PDF booklet, and to share it with your friends online.
Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards - Exteded
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