Frequently Asked Questions

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the parent organization of various projects, including Wikipedia, the award-winning online encyclopedia. Other online projects include Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary; Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks; Wikiquote, a repository of famous quotes; and Wikisource, a repository for primary source material.

Wikimedia is a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales on June 20, 2003. In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board 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.

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 wikiengine 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 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.

Organization

Bylaws

The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. have been posted on the Foundation's main web site.

The Board of Trustees

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

Income

As of January 2005, Wikimedia is funded in most part through private donations, but through several grants and gifts of servers and hosting (see benefactors).

There are regularly discussion of finding alternate sources of income, such as grants or selling WikiReaders. 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 Wikipedia, such as the Wikipedia 1.0 project. Finally, a membership system should be set during 2005.

For more information about donations, see our fundraising page.

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 meta:What we use the money for.

One of the main expenses for the Foundation is hardware.

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

Three servers will be soon hosted in France as squids. The hosting and bandwidth have been donated.

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 w:en:domain names, while others are still free or already owned.　see also m:Domain names.

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

Local chapters

We have a local chapter in Germany , Wikimedia Deutschland start at June, 13 2004. See also Local chapters and Wikimedia Deutschland for their work.

The French chapter, Wikimédia France, started on October, 23th, 2004. See Wikimédia France for more information.

Other local chapters are planning now. You can see how it going Local Wikimedia chapter.

Contacting the Foundation

See the "contact us" page for details.