Frequently Asked Questions

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the parent organization of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, In Memoriam 9/11 and Nupedia. It is a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Its existence was officially announced by former Bomis CEO and Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales on June 20, 2003.

The goals of the foundation

The goals of the foundation are to maintain and develop feww content, w:en:wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. In addition to managing the already developed multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, there is a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote and a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks. The Foundation also manages a memorial collection of articles about the Sept. 11. attacks and the operations of the largely dormant Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content). All projects work thanks to a wikiengine called MediaWiki.

The Wikimedia Foundation owns the Wikimedia servers along with the domain names and trademarks of all Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki. Contributors, however, own the content and the GNU FDL license used on these projects prevents anyone from controling the content.

The continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects is dependent on donations. The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase revenue by finding alternative means of financing, including grants and sponsorship.

The name Wikimedia is a portmanteau of wiki and multimedia, although all the Wikimedia projects so far are heavily dominated by one medium: text.

Organization

Bylaws

The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. have been posted on the Foundation's main web site: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/bylaws.pdf.

The Board of Trustees

A Wikimedia Board of Trustees manage the nonprofit and supervise the disposition and solicitation of nonprofit donations.

The initial trustees (article IV, sec. 2.2.) include the following individuals, three partners and two (other) Wikipedians:

• Jimbo Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and designated life member
• Michael Davis, trustee
• Tim Shell, trustee
• Florence Nibart-Devouard, trustee, contributing user representative
• Angela Beesley, trustee, volunteer user representative

The Board of Trustees are the ultimate corporate authority in the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (article IV, sec. 1). The Board has the power to direct the activities of the foundation. It also has the authority to set membership dues, discipline and suspend members (article III), and to amend the corporate bylaws (article VI).

Board meetings

• Board minutes

Officers and committees

• WMF officers

Financial situation

Income

As of July, 2004, Wikipedia is funded exclusively through private donations.

For some time, there has been discussion of finding alternate sources of income. Some have suggested we seek grants, or sell WikiReaders. For the time being, we want Wikipedia to remain free of advertisement. There has also been discussion of selling a print version of Wikipedia, such as the Wikipedia 1.0 project. Finally, a membership system should be set during 2004.

For more information about donations, see

• Wikimedia Fundraising page for current account balances
• Wikimedia PayPal donations for 2003

Liabilities

For the details of what we have done with donations since the start of 2004, and how we plan to use our funds, see What we use the money for.

One of the main expenses for the Foundation is hardware.

• Description of the hardware that powers Wikimedia : Wikimedia servers
• Frequently updated status of this hardware : Wikimedia hardware status
• Next planned order(s) : Q3 and Q4 2004 hardware order worksheet

Bandwidth is essentially paid by Jimbo Wales.

Three servers will be soon hosted in France as squids. The hosting and bandwidth will be provided for free.

The Foundation currently spend no money on salaries or any other type of employee / consultant / volunteer compensation. It may reimburse costs, such as travel costs, shipping costs, or phone bills in the future.

Domain registrations is another part of Wikimedia liabilities. We already own some of our active and secondary/tangentially-related domain names, while others are still free or already owned.

See also Wikimedia budget/Sample budget for a detailed list of other potential expenses.

Todo

• Rephrase the content (perhaps make a sub page for the history)
• fix the links
• The new page should explain what the Foundation Wikimedia is about, with in particular links to "projects" supported, links to charter.
• Should be in several languages (go hunt for versions in other languages)
• Organisation of the Foundation
• Board
  • 1. Add a page to define current board and how it was elected. Description of each trustee (transparency)
  • Meetings
  • Reports
• Legal records: bylaws, AoI, Public Record, 501(c)(3), RfS
  • By-laws (link to non-pdf version)
• Members
• Committees
• Official positions
• Org chart
• links to finance, budget (which will also be available from membership and donation main pages)

etc...