Answers/Wikimedia Foundation

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The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.

If the answer to the question you seek is not below, please see our frequently asked questions as well as the Answers/Index for older responses to general interest questions. Otherwise, if the links on the left do not provide the information you are seeking or offer you other information on how to contact us or appropriate volunteers to resolve problems or questions in those areas, please feel free to email us at answers@wikimedia.org (See Answers/Process for information and terms.)

If you are interested in general discussion about Wikimedia and its projects with the community, please join one of our public mailing lists or IRC channels.


If you would like to know if a particular website belongs to us

Because "wiki" is a generic term that may be used by anyone, there is sometimes confusion about which websites the Wikimedia Foundation hosts. Beyond this, other sites may use MediaWiki software - which is free and open for anyone - and therefore look similar to our projects. The only projects which are part of the Wikimedia Foundation are those listed at wmf:Our projects.

If you would like to tell us an idea you have for a new project or to improve an existing project

We appreciate that you're spending time thinking about ways to improve our work! Because the Wikimedia Foundation does not create or curate the contents on Wikipedia or the other sites we manage—this work is done by a vast community of volunteers—we are not able to implement suggestions directly by email request. Changes to existing projects and new project approval comes from this community of volunteers.

If you want to propose an entirely new project, please visit meta:Project proposals. If what you'd like to propose is a new feature for one of our existing projects, please share your thoughts with the volunteers at that project. Just as articles can be edited by anyone, there are community forums for ideas and suggestions. Most of our projects have a link on the right hand side to community discussion points, sometimes given titles like "village pump" or "cafe" or "travelers pub."

Just as article pages can be edited by anyone, so can these discussion pages. If you're not already familiar with how to edit our pages, the MediaWiki guide on editing, mw:Help:Editing, can be useful. If you need further assistance, either with editing or with finding a proper home for your discussion, the community maintains a volunteer email response team who should be able to assist. Please be sure to tell them specifically which project and in what language you are working on; if you are more comfortable corresponding in languages other than English, they can in many cases communicate with you in your native tongue.

We hope that the community will be receptive to your idea.

If you would like to translate documents for us

Thank you for your interest in assisting!

Wikipedia relies on volunteers who generate and maintain all content as well as creating policies and guidelines to govern the site. It is a collaborative project, with people from all over the world bringing their skills and interests to join in the compilation and dissemination of knowledge to everyone, everywhere, free of charge. The other projects we maintain are also collaborative, crowd-sourced projects that rely on volunteers. Translation is a volunteer-driven activity on our websites, just like content creation.

If you want to translate content from one of our projects to another, a general approach to translation from English Wikipedia to other projects is provided here: w:WikipediaTranslate us. This approach is likely to succeed on most projects with most languages. If you want specific advice from other volunteers, you can reach out to the "help" or community discussion forum on the project where you want to place the translation. These are generally linked from the side of every page. If you can't find it, you can write to info@wikimedia.org for more information. Please, in that case, specify the language project where you want to work (for instance, Italian Wiktionary; French Wikipedia).

If you are interested in helping to translate official documents used for management of Wikimedia projects, this work is also done by volunteers. Meta:Babylon is a good place to begin. There is a section there on getting started which includes some important links, and there is also a section on communication that tells you some of the best places to get in touch with other translators, who may be able to give you specifics about the work. We'd recommend reading the tutorial linked from the "getting started" section before beginning, if you choose to pitch in.

Thanks for your interest, and we hope you will decide to join us.

If you would like to request a donation to your charity

As you may already know, the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization with a very specific goal, which is to develop and maintain our suite of online open-content educational resources in all the languages of the world, to be distributed free of charge to the public. As we are a nonprofit organization incorporated in Florida, United States, local and national laws prohibit us from using our funds for anything but this purpose.

If you would like to work for the Wikimedia Foundation

Job openings are listed at Job openings. If you see a job that looks like a good match for you, please click on it to read a more complete description. Information on where to send your resume will be included in the description. Usually, there is a link at the bottom that says "Apply Now."

If none of the jobs currently listed there seem suitable to you, please keep an eye on that page. New job openings are listed there routinely as they become available.

If you would like to advertise on our websites

The Wikimedia Foundation does not accept advertisement.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not against the world of online advertising or against other organizations that host ads, but it does not believe that advertising belongs in a project devoted to education, particularly one that is driven by the values consistent with a balanced, neutral encyclopedia. The global volunteer community has always felt that advertising would have a major effect on our ability to stay neutral and that ultimately ads would weaken the readers' overall confidence in the articles they are reading. Even if advertisers put no pressure on us to slant articles to their favor, readers may fear that they exert an influence, consciously or otherwise.

In addition, the Foundation has strong views about reader privacy. Current models for web advertising are inconsistent with these, particularly contextual advertising, which reads the content you are viewing. The Foundation also thinks it intrusive to deliver ads to readers based on their geography.

If you'd like to read more about the history of discussions about advertising Wikipedia - including both pros and cons - the volunteer community has written a page about it at w:Wikipedia:Advertisements.