Wikimedia Foundation website/fr
| Le personnel et les employés de la Fondation Wikimédia contribuent à maintenir le contenu de cette page aux côtés de la communauté des bénévoles. |  |
The Wikimedia Foundation website (wikimediafoundation.org) is the primary corporate website of the Wikimedia Foundation. Unlike Wikimedia projects, the website is wholly owned, developed, and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. The website launched in July 2003, and beginning in 2017 is maintained by the Communications department.
2025 Website refresh
The objectives of the refresh are to increase understanding, trust, and affinity for the Foundation and its projects, while creating a welcoming environment that encourages our target audiences to take action in support of the Wikimedia movement. This may include making a donation, advocating for our mission, signing up for newsletters, or engaging in other actions.
This effort is guided by a set of design principles that shape the website’s structure, tone, and user experience. These principles emphasize simplicity and clarity, favoring compelling visuals while maintaining a user-centered approach that organizes content around audience needs rather than internal structures. They prioritize clear, focused navigation and meaningful calls to action to engage users throughout their journey. The design is inclusive and mobile-first, ensuring accessibility and performance across diverse devices and global audiences. At the same time, the site reflects the Wikimedia Foundation’s brand identity and leverages modern web standards to maximize reach. These guiding principles provide a flexible framework that directs how we design, build, and continuously improve the website.
As part of this, a phased rollout of updates to the website’s design system, site structure and content is scheduled to take place between July and August 2025.
Content updates will focus on key areas including the homepage, top navigation and footer, as well as on the who we are, reports, and people pages.
Objectifs
The objective of the Wikimedia Foundation website is to inspire, inform, and educate audiences about the Foundation’s mission and its role in supporting Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects.
The site serves as a central hub to help external audiences understand the Foundation’s nonprofit model, its central role in supporting the technology that makes Wikipedia possible as well as the value of human-created knowledge, and the Foundation’s role in building a better internet that can enable free knowledge projects like Wikipedia to thrive.
Audiences
In June 2024, the External Communications team hosted a web strategy workshop where, in collaboration with key stakeholders from across the Foundation, we identified and prioritized the website’s key user groups. Audience prioritization was informed by user research (i.e. interviews and surveys with volunteers and a range of external audiences), and aligned with organizational goals and strategic objectives.
Primary user groups
- General public: any site visitor, Wikipedia reader, technologist, or information seeker, who could potentially become a donor, volunteer, a partner, or job applicant.
- Policymakers, advocacy organisations and regulators.
- Existing small donors
Secondary user groups
- Active job applicants
- Existing & new big donors or their wealth managers
- Existing advocates and supporters
- Media
- Existing or potential partners: cultural, tech, and research
Other user groups
- Existing volunteers (Wikimedians)
- Employees
Development and maintenance
The website is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation Communications department, which oversees all aspects of development, strategy and vision, content, structure, and coordination.
- Development and technical support: Technical development and maintenance are handled by Human Made, a partner agency contracted by the External Communications team. The External Communications team manages the relationship and leads the product roadmap and long-term vision. Human Made works in monthly sprints to deliver updates and improvements.
- Hosting and theme: The site is hosted on WordPress VIP by Automattic and built using WordPress, with a custom, exclusive theme called Shiro, developed specifically for this site.
- We use the Gutenberg editor for content creation and layout management, leveraging custom blocks tailored to the site’s needs. This setup enables a flexible and streamlined editorial workflow.
- The theme and site codebase are maintained in the main GitHub repository.
- WordPress VIP requirements: WordPress VIP hosting by Automattic has a number of additional development requirements and a code review process which must be followed before any code can be deployed on their production servers. There are also different development environments for on the site:
Local,Development,PreproductionandProduction. - Domain and infrastructure: Domain-related operations, including DNS management and backend infrastructure, are handled by the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team.
- Design: Website design is developed in Figma, in collaboration with the Brand Studio team for specific features. All design work follows the Product Design Codex guidelines, Wikimedia’s design system. We also partner with external vendors when needed to support specific design initiatives.
- Analytics: The site uses Jetpack and Matomo for analytics. The implementation and maintenance of Matomo is done in collaboration with the Data Platform team.
Content
Aligned with the website content style guide, content on top-level and key pages across all languages are updated at regular intervals, rather than on an ongoing basis.
Traductions
Translations into target languages are made possible thanks to partnerships with the Wikimedia Movement Communications Translators Group.
Lien interwiki
The interwiki link for the Wikimedia Foundation website is foundationsite:
Example: foundationsite:About
WordPress theme usage
The WordPress theme developed for the Wikimedia Foundation website, known as Shiro, is available for download and use by movement groups and affiliates. Documentation on implementing the theme is available on Meta-Wiki.
Historique
The website was originally launched as a redirect to Wikimedia.org in July 2003 - shortly after the founding of the Wikimedia Foundation. Soon after, a simple HTML based page was launched.
The next version of the website, using the MediaWiki platform and also known as Foundation wiki, was proposed in 2004 and launched in July of that year. In May 2013, administrator access was limited to staff, contractors, and the Board.[1] At one time, it housed most documentation related to the Wikimedia Foundation. However, that documentation has increasingly been shifted to Meta-Wiki to better support community engagement.
In 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation Communications department began work to improve and update the Foundation’s website. A new version of the website, using the WordPress platform, was soft launched on 30 July 2018. At that time, the previous website was repurposed for the Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki. On 9 July 2019, the department deployed an updated design of the site, in collaboration with the Product Design team.
In late 2022, the Digital Media team of the Foundation's Communications department officially took over management of the organization websites initiative encompassing the Wikimedia Foundation website. A web manager was hired to oversee multiple website operations, including those related to the Wikimedia Foundation website.
A phased rollout of updates to the website’s design system, site structure and content is scheduled to take place between July and August 2025. Content updates will focus on key areas including the homepage, top navigation and footer, as well as on the who we are, reports, fundraising, and people pages. The website refresh reflects a shift toward more user-focused storytelling and ensures the site continues to meet modern accessibility and web standards.
More historical information
Notes
- ↑ Announcement: "At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff nor board be disabled, effective immediately."