In 2016, Wikipedia grew by 5 million articles. Wikimedia Commons—the multimedia repository that holds the images used on Wikipedia—added 5 million media files. Across the world, mobile pageviews to our free knowledge websites increased by 170 million. Every month we receive visits from 1 billion devices—laptops, mobile phones, and other internet connected technology—making us one of the world’s most popular sites.

Readers around the world

Our global community

About 80,000 people actively contribute to Wikipedia each month. These generous volunteers are responsible for much of the new content across our Wikipedia projects. Millions of others have contributed to Wikipedia over the course of our lifetime.

The number of Wikipedia’s articles, edits, and pageviews testify to the importance of the Wikimedia projects to free knowledge in the world.

Every single day:

Supporting global growth

We fund creativity in our communities through grants that support small, innovative projects around the world. These funds make it possible for experts, researchers, volunteers, and engineers working to expand Wikipedia in a fundamental way. In the past year, our grants program funded a wide array of projects, including:

Improving our platform

Across Wikimedia’s technology initiatives, 2016 marked a year of milestones. At the year’s beginning, Google lauded Wikipedia’s Android app naming it a best of the year. In May, NASA proudly explained how they use MediaWiki—the collaborative technology that powers Wikipedia—to share information about space suits across their organization. In July, the Content Translation tool powered its 100,000th new article as Spanish editors adapted an English article about a Buddy Holly rock song. We helped readers in countries with high data costs save money, we improved how Wikipedia content is displayed in search results, and we improved searching for content on Wikimedia project pages. Near the year’s end we also announced Victoria Coleman as the Foundation’s new Chief Technology Officer. Victoria brings more than 20 years of experience to the movement, and first started working on open source software as a student developing projects in Unix.