In practice, any person who has access to the World Wide Web may read the content of Wikipedia on the website wikipedia.org without paying any money. This, however, does not mean that Wikipedia content is fully non-commercial. Copies of Wikipedia content can be sold.

Who owns Wikipedia? Wikipedia's tech framework is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also supports Wikipedia's sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and others, and owns all of their domain names. Previously, the site was hosted on the servers of Bomis, a company mostly owned by Jimmy Wales.

Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by presenting information on all branches of knowledge. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it consists of freely editable content, whose articles also have numerous links to guide readers towards more information.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months.