When the Library of Alexandria first burned in 48 BC, it was entirely by accident. Julius Caesar had ordered a siege on Alexandria, and as his soldiers burned Egyptian ships docked nearby, the fire spread to parts of the city, destroying about 40,000 of the library’s scrolls. In 391 AD, Roman Emperor Theodosius I forbade pagan worship and ordered the temples, including the temple where the library of Alexandria was housed, to be destroyed.
Even before the first fire erupted, though, the library had begun to decline. By the second destruction, it’s unclear how much of its contents had already been lost. Although the true story of the Library of Alexandria’s demise is complex, and its collapse didn’t happen all at once, one thing is clear: The lamentable loss of the knowledge it housed has resonated with people throughout history.
While there isn’t an exact physical equivalent to Alexandria’s “universal library” today, we do have digital sources that evoke it in terms of sheer scope: the Internet Archive, a digital library that provides free access to websites, books, movies, music and software; and Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that has become all but ubiquitous for today’s casual and even more serious knowledge-seekers.
What is the Wikimedia Foundation and what does it fund?
Wikipedia’s breadth and reach is staggering. As of March 2025, it houses more than 64.5 million articles, is available in 300 languages, and is visited more than 15 billion times every month. Unlike social media, Google and other proprietary sources of online information, Wikipedia is not a profit-seeking platform. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a way to fund “an essential infrastructure of free knowledge,” is the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia. It also includes a number of other projects, including its media repository, Wikimedia Commons, which has more than 115 million images that are free to use.
In addition to its Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia Foundation also provides grants to Wikimedia community members, affiliates and nonprofits, in addition to supporting education and learning around the globe, and promoting knowledge equity. Most of its grant funding is awarded through the Wikimedia Community Fund. Its subprograms are the Rapid Fund, which provides funds for short-term, low-cost projects; the Conference & Event Fund, which supports local and regional conferences; the General Support Fund for larger projects, programs or strategic plans; and Multi Year Funding, which is available to previous General Support Fund grantees that need sustained support.
In 2020, the foundation launched its Knowledge Equity Fund, a $4.5 million fund for organizations supporting knowledge equity by addressing racial inequities that prevent access and participation in free knowledge. Grantees include Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, Black Cultural Archives, Data for Black Lives, the Filipino American National Historical Society and Create Caribbean Research Institute.
Wikimedia Foundation also engages in advocacy work, which includes protecting rights to access and share knowledge, opposing government censorship, advancing internet regulations, promoting open copyright licenses, protecting privacy and fighting disinformation. For instance, the foundation submitted an amicus brief in a case before Mexico’s Supreme Court, arguing that internet intermediary platforms should be protected from liability for user-generated content.
Who are the major funders supporting Wikipedia?
As a nonprofit platform, Wikipedia is sustained through donations and grants from individuals, corporations and institutional funders.
One of the Wikimedia Foundation’s major donors, which Wikimedia defines as donors who have given more than $50,000, is French-American author Antoine Bello, who has been directing the royalties from his book, “Les Éclaireurs”, to the Wikimedia Foundation since 2014 in gratitude for Wikipedia’s help with research for his work.
“I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to it, because I think people are benefitting from this miracle, and they don’t realize it’s a miracle,” Bello said in a post on Diff, Wikimedia’s community blog. “Nobody’s getting paid for it. There’s no advertising. You’re not harvesting my data. And it’s very up to date…With this donation, and whenever I can, I try to evangelize and tell people how great it is.”
The Wikimedia Foundation also receives significant support from funders interested in expanding access to knowledge. The U.K.-based Arcadia Fund’s interests, for example, include promoting open access to knowledge. The fund holds that “access to knowledge is a fundamental human right.”
The Arcadia Fund’s grants to the Wikimedia Foundation include general support for Wikipedia, funding to grow the Wikidata and Wikibase contributor base, and support for Wikipedia projects, including expanding Wikipedia Zero, which sought to provide free access to Wikipedia for low-income students overseas.
Although much of its funding focuses on research and education in STEM and economics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is also interested in expanding access to knowledge. For years, it funded Wikipedia through its now-completed Universal Access to Knowledge program, but has said it may continue its funding for Wikipedia through its Special Initiatives program, whose work includes strengthening public access to information and combating misinformation.
The Omidyar Network committed “up to” $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation in 2009. According to data from Candid, Omidyar awarded a total of $1.5 million to the foundation. Between 2009 and 2010, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded $1.3 million in general operating support for the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Knight Foundation has also supported the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2016, for example, it awarded a $250,000 grant to Wikimedia to help it improve public access to information, and in 2013, Wikimedia received a grant to support its Wikipedia Zero project through the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge.
In 2023, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a $1 million grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikipedia’s efforts to translate its entries into a range of ranges and make knowledge available to a larger, more global audience.
Wikimedia Foundation also receives substantial support from Acton Family Giving, a donor-advised fund from Brian and Tegan Acton of WhatsApp fame. Other funders include Google.org, Charina Endowment Fund, Crankstart Foundation, Foundation for a Better World, David and Amy Fulton Foundation, James A. Winke Family Trust, and King Baudouin Foundation.
The Wikipedia Endowment was established in 2016 and is the permanent safekeeping fund that aims to produce income to support Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. Some of its major benefactors include Amazon, the Arcadia Fund, Google.org, George Soros, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, Dalio Philanthropies, Gupta Family Foundation, I.W. Foundation, Julia Rausing Trust and Sigrid Rausing Trust. The Wikipedia Endowment was initially launched as a Collective Action Fund at the Tides Foundation. In 2023, the endowment was granted 501c3 status. The endowment funds were transitioned out of the Tides Foundation to form an independent endowment and the fund at Tides was terminated.
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Calls to defund Wikipedia echo wider attacks on knowledge and facts
While Wikipedia’s decentralized, community-sourced model has always contained some room for error, it’s a vital and reasonably reliable destination for anyone seeking basic information on a subject, as well as a powerful example of how a not-for-profit platform can thrive on an internet that is now dominated by large, profit-seeking companies.
Despite all its benefits, Wikipedia has been attacked numerous times throughout its 24-year history. Recently, right-wing figures, including ones aligned with the Trump administration, have called for Wikipedia to be defunded. These calls fall in line with the ongoing diminishment of, and attacks against, knowledge, facts and information.
Notably, Elon Musk has called for defunding Wikipedia until “balance is restored,” arguing that the internet encyclopedia is ideologically biased against right-wing causes and is “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” As The Atlantic pointed out in a recent article, Musk’s criticism coincided with an update to his Wikipedia page which noted that the salute he made during President Donald Trump’s inauguration “was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute.”
This is far from the first time Musk has gone after Wikipedia. In the past, he’s also called it “broken,” has said it is “controlled by far-left activists” and has encouraged people to stop donating to it until “it starts being truthful.” In an ironic twist, Musk himself has helped fund Wikipedia. According to tax filings, in 2020, he donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation through the Musk Foundation to “support free knowledge.” The Musk Foundation has also donated at least $2 million to the Wikipedia Endowment.
Some of the right’s criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation can be traced to opposition to its regranting and advocacy spending. Though that criticism has often stretched and contradicted the facts, Wikimedia Foundation does have a record of giving to left-of-center organizations. Examples listed in recent tax records include Tides Advocacy, Artfeminism Inc., Black Lunch Table and Whose Knowledge. Though Elon Musk has claimed that funding equates to $50 million a year, such gifts have, in fact, been fairly modest, in the low to mid-six figures. The $4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund and the fact that the Wikipedia Endowment was previously located at Tides are also part of the equation here.
Although some of this funding has arguably exposed the Wikimedia Foundation to right-wing critique, attacks on Wikipedia are a cause for alarm. While not without its flaws, Wikipedia is a powerful tool for the democratization of knowledge and information.
On its website, the Arcadia Fund states that knowledge is a human right: “It advances research and innovation, improves decision-making, exposes misinformation and is vital to achieving greater equality and justice.”
That may play into why accurate knowledge as a whole has been under intense attack in recent years. Misinformation and disinformation are rampant and detrimental to democracy. The rise of anti-intellectualism has tracked with the rise of Trumpist populism, threatening not only democracy itself, but also people’s health and wellbeing. Take, for instance, vaccine skepticism, the effects of which we’re currently seeing in the measles outbreak that began in Texas and is now spreading to other states.
Other attacks targeting knowledge include “unprecedented” book bans, legislation and executive orders banning the teaching of topics such as slavery, Jim Crow and the Holocaust, and what may be the imminent dismantling of the Department of Education.
As these attacks continue, it’s more important than ever for funders to continue supporting and safeguarding organizations that foster learning. Only then can we ensure that in the future, Wikipedia, and free knowledge on the web in general, don’t share the fate of the great Library of Alexandria.
