Frequently Asked Questions

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the parent organization of various free-content projects, most notably Wikipedia, the award-winning online encyclopedia.

Wikimedia is a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on June 20, 2003. In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board of Trustees 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 reelected the following year. In July 2006, Angela Beesley announced her resignation and in September 2006, Erik Möller was elected as her replacement.

The goals of the foundation

The goals of the foundation are to maintain and develop free-content, 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 September 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 wiki software package called MediaWiki.

The Wikimedia Foundation owns the Wikimedia servers along with the domain names and trademarks of all Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki. Contributors retain the copyright to their own content and the GNU FDL license used on these projects prevents anyone from controlling the content.

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

The name Wikimedia is a portmanteau of wiki and multimedia.

See also our mission statement.

Organization

Bylaws

The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. are available online.

The Board of Trustees

The Wikimedia Board of Trustees manages the nonprofit organization and supervises the solicitation and disposition of donations. The Board of Trustees is the ultimate corporate authority in the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (article IV, sec. 1 of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws). 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).

Income

As of January 2006, Wikimedia is funded in most part through private donations, but also through several grants and gifts of servers and hosting (see benefactors).

There are regularly discussions of finding alternate sources of income, such as applying for grants or selling WikiReaders (textbook or pdf version of articles from Wikipedia). For the time being, we want the Wikimedia projects to remain free of advertisements. There has also been discussion of selling a print version of a significant portion of Wikipedia, such as a "Wikipedia 1.0" project.

For more information about donations, see our fundraising page.

Expenditures

For details on 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 expenditures for the Foundation is hardware.

• Description of the hardware that powers Wikimedia : Wikimedia servers, hardware orders
• Frequently updated status of this hardware : Wikimedia hardware status

Six servers are now being hosted in France as squids, with another eleven in the Netherlands, and a further 23 in South Korea donated by Yahoo. The hosting and bandwidth have been donated.

The Foundation also employs a small staff.

Domain registration is another part of Wikimedia's expenditures. The Foundation already owns some of its active and secondary/tangentially-related w:en:domain names, while others are still free or already owned.

See also meta:Wikimedia budget for a detailed list of other potential expenses. See budget for official budgets.

Local chapters

The following active Wikimedia chapters have been formed:

• Wikimedia Deutschland, founded on June 13, 2004
• Wikimédia France, founded on October 23rd, 2004
• Wikimedia Italia, founded on June 17th, 2005
• Wikimedia Polska, founded on August 14th, 2005
• Wikimedia Србије и Црне Горе (Serbia and Montenegro), founded on December 3rd, 2005
• Wikimedia CH, founded on May 14th, 2006
• Wikimedia Nederland, a chapter since September 24, 2006

Other local chapters are also being planned.

Contacting the Foundation

See the "Contact us" page for details.