14.11.2025

As of this week, we are a supporting member of Wikimedia Germany e.V. The association was founded in 2004. According to its statutes, "The purpose of the association is the selfless promotion of the creation, collection, and dissemination of free content to promote equal opportunities in access to knowledge and education." The association supports the German language version of Wikipedia, the world's best-known free encyclopedia, the free knowledge database Wikidata, the media collection Wikimedia Commons, and many other wikis.

Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001. The content is created and maintained by volunteer authors, who receive no financial compensation for their work. Wikipedia offers approximately 60 million encyclopedic articles. It is the only non-commercial website among the top 50 worldwide—as well as in German-speaking countries.

The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of "wiki" and "encyclopedia." Wikis are hypertext systems for websites whose content can not only be read by users but also edited online in a web browser. The articles are interconnected in a network-like structure.

Wikipedia Germany maintains a number of collaborations, including with the Federal Archives, the Dresden University Library, the German Photo Library, several universities, and television broadcasters. Wikimedia Enterprise, a subsidiary of the Wikimedia Foundation founded on October 25, 2021, is pursuing another collaboration. As a commercial project, it aims to generate up to 30 percent of the foundation's revenue through licensing fees by selling Wikipedia content. For example, Apple and Amazon would have to pay to use Wikipedia with Siri and Alexa, which they currently do for free.

In an October 2025 blog post, Marshall Miller, the Wikimedia Foundation's senior product director, reported that Wikipedia experienced an eight percent decline in page views attributable to human visitors compared to the same period the previous year. AI is changing internet search, allowing users to ask more complex questions and receive more complex answers compared to traditional internet research. Chatbot responses often lack source citations, and when they do, these sources are usually not directly clickable. Among the effects of AI on Wikipedia, in addition to declining page views driven by informational interest, is a massive increase in chatbot access for AI training, placing a greater strain on Wikipedia's resources. It is speculated that the number of contributors and the number of contributions to the further development of Wikipedia will decrease as a result of the impact of AI.

In September, the managing director wrote to us, rightly emphasizing the invaluable worth of reliable, neutral, fact-based, and substantiated knowledge in today's flood of disinformation, especially since it is always available, ad-free, and free of charge. She also pointed out that Wikipedia and its contributors are increasingly facing pressure and hostility.

This whole project doesn't finance itself—it needs donations. In the current fundraising campaign, a pop-up informs users that Wikipedia and the appeal are seen over 5 million times daily, but only around 130,000 people have donated so far, averaging less than €30. We want to help increase this success rate.

Not only is democracy not a given, but neither is free and reliable knowledge.