Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Its mission, as reflected in the site’s description, is to provide open access to knowledge contributed by people rather than machines. Readers can search and explore millions of articles across a wide range of subjects, with content available in numerous languages.

The homepage highlights editions with more than a million articles, including English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Portuguese, alongside many smaller language editions. Wikipedia’s core offering is its freely accessible reference content, supported by a global community of volunteer contributors. The Wikimedia Foundation also hosts other free knowledge projects and invites readers to support its work through donations.

The site emphasizes that it is run by a nonprofit rather than a technology company or billionaire, and says it does not sell donor information. Through its multilingual encyclopedia and community-edited model, Wikipedia makes a broad collection of human-created information available to readers worldwide