Frequently Asked Questions

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

What is the mission of the Foundation ?

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

See also our mission statement.

What is the legal status of Wikimedia Foundation ?

Wikimedia is a non-profit charitable corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Fully audited, The Wikimedia Foundation is now listed as a charitable organization at Guidestar (www.guidestar.org) and its partner sites.

The existence of the Wikimedia Foundation was officially announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on June 20, 2003. The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. are available online.

Which projects do you support ?

WMF supports Wikipedia, the famous online encyclopedia, among the 15th most visited websites in the world end of 2006. However, the Foundation operates several projects beside Wikipedia, such as Wikimedia Commons, the repository of free images and other media, which surpassed 1 million images in november 2006. Wiktionary, the free dictionary, has 8 dictionaries with more than 50,000 entries, three of which have more than 200,000 definitions. Wikisource, an original source repository, is nearing 150,000 pages of content. Wikiquote (quotations), Wikibooks (collaboratively written books), Wikinews (citizen journalism), and Wikiversity (curriculum development) all continue to grow along the same trendline.

Wikitravel, Omegawiki and Wikia are not projects supported by the Foundation.

From the founding of Wikipedia in January, 2001, and the incorporation of the Wikimedia Foundation in June, 2003, our growth has been staggering. We now host more than 225 projects in over 120 languages. The English-language Wikipedia, our first project, has expanded from 135 thousand articles at the time of incorporation to 1.5 million articles today. 12 other languages boast Wikipedias of over 100,000 articles of their own. Overall, our projects have more than 7.8 million pages, 2.2 million images, and 5 million registered accounts.

More information may be found at our projects. Here is a report on the state of Wikisource.

How is the Foundation run ?

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.

The Foundation is also run by a staff of 6 people (end of 2006); however most people helping are volunteers (including board members).

This site includes a complete list of notes from Board meetings.

Who are the members of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation and later made a call for candidates for community representatives [1].

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 2005. In July 2006, Angela Beesley announced her resignation and in September 2006, Erik Möller was elected as her replacement.

The complete list of board members may be found at Board.

How does the Foundation serves its mission ?

First, the Wikimedia Foundation owns the Wikimedia servers along with the domain names and trademarks of all Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki. It generally supports all the costs of having the projects up and in working order.
Note: Contributors retain the copyright to their own content and free licenses, such as the GNU FDL, are used on these projects prevents anyone from controlling the content.

Besides, the Foundation plays an important innovative part in further developing the projects, connecting people, promoting collaboration with other parties etc...

In particular, each of our projects has unique technological requirements, which are met by our small but efficient team of software developers. The highest priority in 2007 will be a renewed focus on quality assurance. This will include mechanisms to identify trusted versions of content such as Wikipedia articles.

Ensuring success in all endeavors of the Foundation will make it necessary to collaborate with organizations and companies around the planet. Our financial planning includes professional staff who will pursue such strategic partnerships, as well as coordinate our growing network of chapter organizations in various countries.

How is the revenue spent ?

Overall, the lion’s share of WMF expenditures support our programs. Foremost are our expenses for the hardware and bandwidth that keep our websites up and running.

The single greatest expenditure for WMF is hardware, followed by hosting and bandwidth costs. The WMF has seen its inventory of computer hardware increase steadily to meet demand. Here is a frequently updated status of this hardware : Wikimedia hardware status.

The main reason for the increase is our growth in traffic. At the end of year 2006, Comscore listed “Wikipedia Sites” as the number six site in the world, measured by unique visitors (*). Wikipedia, our flagship website, received about 285 thousand page views per minute. The WMF is concerned about the capitalization and operational commitments necessary to keep these systems running reliably. These costs alone will exceed $2.5 million dollars in year 2007.
(*) Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes, mobile phones or PDA access.

Domain registration and trademarks 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.

Due to the increase in office staff, administrative costs increased. Overall, however, the allocation of expenses for fundraising is low, due to WMF’s reliance on online donations for the majority of its revenue. WMF does not engage in “direct mail” terrestrial advertising campaigns. Given WMF’s position online, it makes sense to communicate and ask for donations in the same virtual space. To date, it has been effective.

Costs have been kept very low in the past three years, in particular because the largest majority of people helping are volunteers.

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.

Where does the money come from ?

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).

The WMF receives donations from more than 50 countries around the world. Most of the donations which support WMF come from English-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Over half of these donations are anonymous. Though individual donations are relatively small, their sheer numbers have ensured our success to date

The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase revenue by finding alternative means of support, including grants and sponsorship or selling WikiReaders (textbook or pdf version of articles from Wikipedia). There has also been discussion of selling a print version of a significant portion of Wikipedia, such as a "Wikipedia 1.0" project.

For the time being, we want the Wikimedia projects to remain free of advertisements.

The Wikimedia Foundation has 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States. Donations made from other nations may also be tax deductible. See deductibility of donations for details. Please see our fundraising page for details of making donations via PayPal, MoneyBookers or by postal mail. For all other types of donation, please contact the Wikimedia Board at board at wikimedia.org.

For more information about donations, see our fundraising page.

Do you have audited financial statements ?

Our financial statements have been audited for fiscal years 2004, 2005 and 2006 by Gregory Sharer & Stuart (www.gsscpa.com) and are compliant with generally accepted accounting principles.

Links to the financial statements and management letter:

• financial statements
• management letter

What about the 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.

How to contact the Foundation

See the "Contact us" page for details.