Editing MediaWiki Development Services (section)

== Economic and Social Impact ==

The economic impact of the MediaWiki platform is most visible through the Wikimedia projects themselves. Wikipedia is estimated to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in global economic value annually by serving as a foundational reference resource for education, research, journalism, and commercial activity — a figure cited in research published by economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research.<ref>Nagle, F., & Ward, S. (2019). ''To Be or Not to Be Linked''. NBER Working Paper 24715.</ref>

Beyond Wikimedia, the availability of a free, self-hostable wiki platform has reduced the barrier to collective knowledge management for organisations of all sizes. Non-profit organisations, volunteer communities, and educational institutions that could not afford proprietary knowledge management software have been able to deploy structured, searchable wikis at minimal cost.

MediaWiki-powered community wikis have also become primary reference resources for specialised topics — from gaming strategies and local history archives to medical condition information and open educational resources — collectively representing a significant portion of the world's freely accessible, collaboratively maintained knowledge.