Wikimedia projects: How Wikipedia and its sister sites build free knowledge together

When you think of Wikimedia projects, a network of free, open, volunteer-driven knowledge platforms led by the Wikimedia Foundation. Also known as the Wikimedia ecosystem, it includes not just Wikipedia, but also Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and more—each built by people like you who want to share knowledge without ads or paywalls. These aren’t separate websites. They’re parts of one living system. Wikipedia is the biggest, but it doesn’t work alone. Wikinews reports original journalism. Wiktionary defines words in hundreds of languages. Wikiquote collects sayings. All of them rely on the same editing tools, the same community rules, and the same volunteers who show up to fix typos, add sources, and fight spam.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts and supports the technical infrastructure of Wikimedia projects doesn’t write the content. It keeps the servers running, pays for bandwidth, and defends the projects against legal threats. The real work? That’s done by millions of editors around the world. Some are teachers using Wikipedia in class. Others are librarians fact-checking sources. Many are just people who noticed a mistake and fixed it. These projects thrive because they’re open. Anyone can edit. Anyone can help. That’s why content gaps still exist—like underrepresentation of non-English languages or regions in the Global South—but also why progress happens fast when communities organize. Edit-a-thons in Nigeria, translation drives in Indonesia, and mobile editing campaigns in India are all part of the same effort: making sure the world’s knowledge isn’t just written by a few.

And it’s not just about articles. Behind the scenes, tools like TemplateWizard, CirrusSearch, and Toolforge help editors work faster and smarter. Bots block spam. A/B tests make the interface easier to use. Diff tools let you trace how an article changed over time. All of this is part of what makes Wikimedia projects unique: they’re not just a collection of pages. They’re a working system of people, tools, and policies designed to keep knowledge accurate, accessible, and free. What you’ll find below is a collection of real stories from inside this system—how stub articles become B-Class, how editors respond to breaking news, how translation tools help bridge language gaps, and why some Wikipedia editions have more depth than others. These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re daily practices that keep the whole thing alive.