Is wikibooks.org legit or a scam?
Wikibooks is the official, non-profit open-content textbook project from the Wikimedia Foundation with a 20-year history of safety.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
MT Intelligence
The domain has been active since 2003 and is part of the highly trusted Wikimedia ecosystem alongside Wikipedia. Our analysis shows zero malicious detections across 92 security engines and no history of phishing or fraud. The site is operated by a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in San Francisco. Global traffic rankings place it among the most visited educational sites on the internet. There are no risk factors associated with this domain.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for wikibooks.org, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- wikibooks.org is the official domain for Wikibooks, a Wikimedia Foundation project launched in July 2003 for open-content, editable digital textbooks and manuals.
- Owned and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit (tax-exempt charitable organization) with headquarters in San Francisco.
- Content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and GFDL; available in 77 active languages with ~98,000+ pages in English alone.
- No scam reports, fraud complaints, phishing incidents, or negative reviews found across web searches, Reddit, or review sites.
- Positive mentions on Reddit as a free educational resource for languages, programming, and other subjects; used in academic and self-learning contexts.
- Domain registered in 2003; part of the trusted family of Wikimedia sites (alongside Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.).
- Scamadviser gives high trust scores to language variants (e.g., 100/100 for fr.wikibooks.org).
- Wikipediaopen
"Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit."
- Redditopen
"I wasn't even aware of it but the Wikipedia network (Wikibooks) has a number of books designed to teach you a language from beginner to advanced. All for free, naturally."
- Scamadviseropen
"fr.wikibooks.org has an average to good trust score. ... Trust Score 100"
Hosted by Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN 20-0049703), headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Founded 2003.
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No phone number listed on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://wikibooks.org/
- 2301https://wikibooks.org/
- 3200https://www.wikibooks.org/cross-domain
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on wikibooks.org and not a lookalike like w-ikibooks.org.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on wikibooks.org. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- wikibooks.org passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 96/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. wikibooks.org presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · YE1, expiring in 72 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report wikibooks.org as clean.
- No. wikibooks.org is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- wikibooks.org resolves to an IP operated by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. in US (usage type: Data Center/Web Hosting/Transit). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- Yes. wikibooks.org sits in the global top-100k on Cloudflare Radar, which means it has substantial real-world traffic. That does not automatically make it safe, but established brands almost always rank here and throwaway scam domains almost never do.
- This is a permanent record of the scan run on June 23, 2026. The verdict and evidence above reflect that scan and do not change on their own. If circumstances around wikibooks.org have changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan, which re-runs every check from scratch and publishes an updated report.
User reviews & comments(0)
Share your experience — "Lost $200 on a fake checkout" is more useful than "Scam". Your review helps others avoid traps.