Press releases/Wikimedia Foundation board reorganised

Florence Devouard elected Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation
St. Petersburg, Florida, October 28, 2006

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a reorganisation of its Board of Trustees, with Florence Devouard replacing Jimmy Wales as Chair of the Board. This followed a recent planning retreat from October 20-22 in Frankfurt, Germany, attended by the Board and more than 20 members of the Wikimedia community. The Board voted unanimously to elect Devouard as the Chair of the Board, with Tim Shell as Vice-Chair, Erik Moeller as Executive Secretary, and Michael Davis as Treasurer.

The action was taken at the suggestion of the outgoing Chair, Jimmy Wales. Wales, the founder of the Wikipedia project, felt that it would be best to pass on the responsibility for this role, due in part to his commitments to outside projects. He will still remain active in Wikimedia projects and assumes the title of Chairman Emeritus of the Foundation.

Jimmy Wales said: "I nominated Florence to be the Chair of the Foundation in recognition of her outstanding service for the past few years and her unsurpassed passion for our goals. Having such a trusted community representative elected as our new chair demonstrates the growth and strength of our organization."

Devouard was elected to the Board in 2004 by participants in Wikimedia projects. A native of France, she has been a strong supporter of the multilingual nature of the Wikimedia projects. She is, along with Erik Moeller, one of two elected community representatives on the Board. For details, including additional biographical information, see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees.

About Wikimedia
The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth and development of freely distributed content in many languages, such as the well-known Wikipedia encyclopedia, now in over 100 languages. Wikimedia projects include some of the largest collaboratively edited reference works in the world created using wiki software. Along with Wikipedia, one of the top 20 most visited Web sites on the Internet, these projects include Wiktionary (a dictionary), Wikibooks (textbooks), Wikiquote (quotations), Wikisource (source documents), Wikinews (news stories), and the Wikimedia Commons (a media repository).