The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual 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, one of the 20 most visited websites.
The Foundation mostly relies on support from individuals. Please consider making a donation today, be it time, money or hardware. Benefactors's page is dedicated to some of the larger donations made by companies and individuals which are helping to sustain the projects of Wikimedia. The Wikimedia Foundation does not necessarily endorse the activities of its Corporate Benefactors.
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.
Wikimania Wikimania 2006, the second annual international Wikimedia conference, was held August 4–6 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School campus. Both a scientific conference and a community event, Wikimania brought together members of the various Wikimedia projects in order to exchange ideas, build relationships, and report on research and project efforts. It also provided an opportunity for Wikimedians and the general public alike to meet and share ideas about free and open source software, free knowledge initiatives, and wiki projects worldwide.
Wikimedia Chair Jimmy Wales' opening speech is available in streaming form.
Ward at Wikimania (Sj on the left)We caught up with the father of the wiki movement before breakfast on an early Oregon morning, while he was recovering from the recent Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) conference held in Illinois. In between cans of Moxie, we picked his brain about the evolution of wiki, copyright, and the Wikipedia community. Afterward, he came onto IRC to hang out in #wikipedia for a while, where he was duly lauded. See our interview with Ward Cunningham.
We also tracked down Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor, founder and chairman of Creative Commons, and free culturesmith, in a lull at the end of a long December day. In a whirlwind session, he talked to us about copyright, copyleft, barriers to free culture, legal pitfalls for Wikipedia, and fighting the good fight. read more.
This is a free area, with reports by various people on various issues :-) For example, a report on Wikinews, or Wikicommons; a text on a new arbitration committee, a wikijunior publication, a new grassroots initiative to develop a project, etc. Please feel free to add participate and add reports yourself, by following the link above.
Information on prizes and awards are collected in our Trophy box.
Quote of the month
"When I visited the offices in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge." -- impression of the WMF world headquarters by Stacy Schiff, journalist.
The Wikimedia Board of Trustees is the ultimate corporate authority in the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., and has the power to direct the activities of the Foundation. The Foundation bylaws may be seen at Wikimedia Foundation bylaws.
The Foundation manages the Budget, which pays primarily for computer equipment and hosting. Other costs include human resources necessary to the running of the Wikimedia projects, though most people are volunteers. This site includes a complete list of notes from Board meetings.
Privacy policy : If you browse the Wikimedia project websites, we gather no more information than is typically collected in server logs. If you contribute to the Wikimedia projects, you are publishing every word you post publicly. You should assume that anything you write will be retained forever. This includes articles, user pages, talk pages and other pages on the websites.
