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Revision as of 23:47, 10 September 2008

The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of Erik Moeller as Deputy Director, effective January 10, 2008.

"I'm delighted that Erik has agreed to join the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. Since I came to the Foundation in June, I've been impressed with Erik's dedication, his hard work, and his evangelism on behalf of Wikimedia. He's an invaluable addition to the core team," said Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director.

In this new role, Moeller will lead the development and execution of Wikimedia's technical strategy, and a variety of specific initiatives and projects. He will have full delegated authority when the Executive Director is absent.

Moeller has been an active editor of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects since 2001. He has made thousands of edits and uploads, has contributed to the MediaWiki software, and helped launch Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons. He is a frequent writer and commentator on topics such as free content, free software, and wiki technology, and is author of "Die heimliche Medienrevolution," one of the first books to include an in-depth analysis of wiki collaboration.

Most recently, Erik was Chief Technology Officer of Stichting Open Progress, where he managed a decentralized team of developers in the implementation of OmegaWiki, a collaborative ontology database. He also provides hosting for several wiki communities, including WikiEducator.org, and has project-managed other wiki software development projects such as the LiquidThreads discussion system.

Moeller was elected to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees for two consecutive terms, and was most recently its Executive Secretary. As part of the transition to join the staff of the Foundation, he has resigned his post as board member, and will relocate to San Francisco from Berlin.

Moeller's appointment comes as the Wikimedia Foundation relocates from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco. The new headquarters will be fully established February 1, 2008.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit charitable 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. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites. The Foundation was created in 2003 by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation operates the following projects:

Wikipedia, a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Wiktionary, a project to create free content dictionaries and thesauri in every language. Wikiquote, a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Wikibooks, which aims to build a collection of free e-book resources, including textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated public domain books. Wikisource, a collection of classic books, laws, and other free works. Wikispecies, a central, extensive species database for taxonomy. Wikinews, with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. Wikiversity, a project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities. Wikimedia Commons, a central repository for free video, images, music, spoken texts, and other free media that can be easily reused by all Wikimedia projects.

All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by volunteers using the MediaWiki software. All contributions are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (except in Wikinews, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5). This means their content may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.