What assets does it have?

Wikipedia itself. The WMF could continue as an empty shell and sell its core assets. In fact, it would be forced to by law, I believe, if it was badly in debt.

To clarify, Wikipedia comprises not just the stuff which is free of copyright, but primarily the userbase, community, support staff, management structures, and (configured) servers it's hosted on. There's plenty to sell there.

The domain name.

Everything else is easily copied or duplicated, and indeed had been. The only thing you can't copy is the domain name. That's the thing that's worth millions of visitors.

The ability to ask for money more insistently and for a longer period of time.

16B monthly pageviews

I think the word asset is being used in a particular sense here. Page views are not liquid or transferable.

Technically, they could sell the domain & the new owner could maintain the site as-is, but I really don't think that'd happen.

The WMF is mission-driven. A large swath of their funds are spent as grants to other organisations, and they could par that back without affecting their ability to operate.

[disc: Wikipedian since 2004, many friends who are WMF employees]

> they could par that back without affecting their ability to operate

Sure, but can they? Seems like an ever expanding cash sink, according to those financials...

Page views are most definitely transferable. Why do you think Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1B?

I guess more concretely, the wikipedia.org domain is a very valuable asset.