Volunteering is an optional and freely chosen act of an individual or group giving their time and labor, often for community service. Many volunteers have specialized training in the fields that they work in, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others provide their services as needed, such as in response to a natural disaster.
Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to protect public values or make a change in a community. The goal of civic engagement is to address public concerns and promote the quality of the community.
Civic engagement is "a process in which people take collective action to address issues of public concern" and is "instrumental to democracy". Underrepresentation of groups in the government causes issues faced by groups such as minority, low-income, and younger groups to be overlooked or ignored. In turn, issues for higher voting groups are addressed more frequently, causing more bills to be passed to fix these problems.
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.
Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 66 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024. As of September 2025, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each represent around 5%.