Do we like them?

Do we like Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation)?

Non-profit that runs Wikipedia and sister sites, funded by donations and paid data access. Based in San Francisco, US.

Our score: 8 out of 10. Yes, we'd back them. It's a non-profit, ad-free and free to read. The worries are heavy AI scraping and a lost UK court case, not bad behaviour.

Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit. It has no ads and no shareholders. Funding comes mostly from public donations, with annual operating costs of around $179 million, per one report.

There's a new boss. Bernadette Meehan, a former US Ambassador to Chile, was named CEO in December 2025 and started on 20 January 2026. She took over from Maryana Iskander, who had said she would step down.

AI is the big issue. In January 2026 the Foundation announced that Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity and Mistral AI had joined its paid Wikimedia Enterprise program, alongside Google. The terms weren't disclosed. Reuters reported that heavy automated access had pushed up server costs.

In August 2025 the Foundation lost a UK High Court challenge to Online Safety Act categorisation rules. It argued they could put the strictest duties on Wikipedia. The court dismissed the challenge. Wikimedia said the ruling didn't give the protection it hoped for.

Our score is 8. It's a non-profit with no ads, and it makes a free resource that people everywhere rely on. We held back some points because AI is eating into its traffic and its donations.