As stated in our Privacy Policy , Wikimedia believes strongly in the values of privacy and transparency. To that end, we have created this Cookie Statement as a clear reference guide to the use of cookies on Wikimedia Sites. This Cookie Statement explains how we use cookies (and other locally stored data technologies), how we use third-party cookies, and how you can manage your cookie options. For more information on our privacy practices, please visit our Privacy Policy .

Cookies are not required in order to read or edit the Wikimedia Sites. We use the information we receive from cookies and other locally stored data technologies to make your experience with the Wikimedia Sites safer and better, to gain a greater understanding of user preferences and interactions with the Wikimedia Sites, and to generally improve our services. Cookies are required in order to login and for your edits to be associated to a user account; without cookies, your edits will be anonymous and unassociated with an account.

These cookies help the Wikimedia Sites work and are essential in order to enable you to move around the Wikimedia site and use their features. These cookies are useful for remembering your username in the login field, maintaining your session and remembering previous actions, keeping you logged in (if selected), and more.

These cookies count the number of visitors and collect information about how you use the Wikimedia Sites. This allows us to better understand your user experience on the Wikimedia Sites and helps us improve them for you and other users ? for instance, by making sure users are finding what they need easily. Other examples include:

We will never use third-party cookies on our wikis unless we get your permission to do so. These cookies would allow us to render services provided by third parties, such as "like" and "share" buttons. When a third party provides these kinds of services, they may require the use of a cookie in order to provide their services.

A note about Wikimedia Foundation non-wiki sites:

Some non-wiki Wikimedia Foundation sites are hosted by a third-party service provider.

Sites hosted by WordPress VIP may have the WordPress Stats module enabled. Stats is a service that allows us to understand how many visitors we get to our WordPress-hosted non-wiki sites, their location by country, and which pages, posts and links are the most popular. Only the Wikimedia Foundation and the service provider, Automattic/WordPress, have access to the raw Stats data, which is retained for a maximum of 30 days. For more information about Stats, see WordPress' support page on the module .

Sites hosted by Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., known as Discourse forums, use cookies for functionality purposes and to store preferences. Only the Wikimedia Foundation and the service provider have access to the raw data. For more information about the cookies and their retention periods, see Discourse's information about cookies . Please note that the Wikimedia Foundation has not configured its Discourse forums to use Google Analytics, serve advertisements, or process donations; Discourse cookies related to those purposes are not used in our Sites.

While this is not a comprehensive list, below are some of the things that you can do to limit use of cookies and other locally stored data technologies on your device. While cookies and other locally stored data technologies may not be necessary to use our sites, some features may not function properly if you disable them.

Turning off the browser's cookies will prevent tracking pixels from tracking your specific activity. A tracking pixel may still record an anonymous visit from your IP address, but unique information will not be recorded. If you do not want to receive tracking pixels, you will need to disable HTML images in your browser-based email client, and that may affect your ability to view images in other emails that you receive.