Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the parent organization of the Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior and Wikiversity), Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews and Meta-Wiki collaborative projects. It is a non-profit corporation based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida. Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who was hitherto running Wikipedia within his company Bomis, on June 20, 2003. Its approval by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, by letter in April 2005, as an educational foundation in the category "Adult, Continuing Education" means all contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes.

Foundation goals

The goal of the Wikimedia foundation is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.

In addition to the multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Foundation manages a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote, a repository of source texts in any language named Wikisource, and a collection of e-book texts for students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks. Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes on books for children.

The continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects is dependent mostly on donations but the Wikimedia Foundation tries to increase its revenue by finding alternative means of funding such as grants and sponsorship.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a vision to bring a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. This includes people who currently do not have electricity, computers, internet, or even clean drinking water. All proceeds from donations, as with all proceeds from all Foundation fundraisers, are fully dedicated to that charitable purpose.

Foundation history and growth

The name "Wikimedia" was coined by Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English Wikipedia's mailing list in March 2003.Wikipedia English mailing list message, March 2003. The name has been criticized for its similarity to the name of Wikipedia and the software it runs on, MediaWiki; this sometimes leads to confusion among people new to the project.

With the Foundation's announcement, Wales also transferred ownership of all Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Nupedia domain names to Wikimedia along with the copyrights for all materials related to these projects that were created by Bomis employees or Wales himself. The computer equipment used to run all the Wikimedia projects was also donated by Wales to the Foundation. The domain names wikimedia.org and wikimediafoundation.org were secured for the Foundation by Wikipedia contributor Daniel Mayer. Wikimedia's bandwidth and power are covered by donations to the project from various companies and individuals.

In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed his business partners Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation. In June 2004, an election was held for two user representative Board members. Following one month of campaigning and two weeks of online voting, Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to join the board; they were re-elected in July 2005. Wales and Beesley later launched a startup company, Wikia, which is affiliated with neither Wikimedia nor Bomis, though it donates to Wikimedia.

Later, other official positions were developed: Tim Starling was appointed Developer Liaison to help improve the organisation of the development of the MediaWiki software, and Daniel Mayer was appointed Chief Financial Officer to help keep a budget and coordinate fund drives. Erik Möller had been the Chief Research Officer, but resigned in August 2005 due to differences with the board.Wikimedia Foundation mailing list message, August 2005. James Forrester was subsequently appointed to the position.

On July 1, 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board effective upon election of her successor, expressing concern about "certain events and tendencies that have arisen within the organisation since the start of this year," but stating her intent to continue to participate in the Wikimedia projects, and in the formation of an Australian chapter.Wikimedia Foundation mailing list message, July 2006

Wikimedia coordination and projects

Wikimedia projects

Wikipedia: Encyclopedia containing more than 3 million articles in over 200 languages.

Wikipedia Commons: Repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing more than 430,000 files.

Wikibooks: Collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials.

Wiktionary: Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations.

Wikinews: News source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many countries.

Wikisource: Project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain books.

Wikiquote: Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways.

Wikispecies: Directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life.

Meta-Wiki: Wikimedia project coordination.

Recent project history

September 7, 2004: The Wikimedia Commons was launched.
December 3, 2004: After a brief demonstration phase in November, the English beta version of Wikinews became operational. Wikinews is meant to be a free content news source which allows anybody to report news on a wide variety of subjects.
April 2005: 501(c)(3) non-profit status granted by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service with the NTEE Code: B60 (Adult, Continuing Education).
November 2005: Wikimedia awarded membership in the World Technology Network.

Board of Directors

Jimmy Wales (Chairman)
Angela Beesley
Michael E. Davis
Florence Nibart-Devouard
Tim Shell
Executive Director: Brad Patrick (interim/General Counsel)

References

External links

Wikimedia Foundation bylaws (PDF file)
Corporate Charter of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. two page TIFF file located on Florida Department of State, Divisions of Corporations web site
Public Record for Wikimedia Foundation Inc. from Florida Department of State web site
Sheldon Rampton's WikiEN-l post
Interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder

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