Sobre Wikimedia
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La Fundación Wikimedia Inc. es la organización padre de varios proyectos de contenido libre, notablemente Wikipedia, la aclamada enciclopedia en Internet.
¿Cuál es la misión de la Fundación?
La misión de la Fundación Wikimedia es habilitar y animar a personas alrededor del mundo a recopilar y desarrollar contenido educativo bajo una licencia libre o en el dominio público, y difundirlo eficaz y mundialmente.
En colaboración con una red de proyectos, la Fundación proporciona la infraestructura organizativa esencial para posibilitar el desarrollo de proyectos wiki multilingües y otros esfuerzos conformes con la misión. La Fundación hará y mantendrá disponible por Internet información útil de sus proyectos gratuitamente, en perpetuidad.
Véase también nuestra declaración de misión.
¿Wikimedia es una organización benéfica?
Wikimedia es una corporación sin ánimo de lucro benéfica organizada bajo las leyes de Florida, EE. UU.. Totalmente auditada, la Fundación Wikimedia ahora se encuentra alistada como una organización benéfica en Guidestar y sus sitios socios. La Fundación Wikimedia tiene estátus 501(c)(3) de exención fiscal Estados Unidos. La existencia de la Fundación Wikimedia fue anunciado oficialmente por el fundador Jimmy Wales el 20 de junio de 2003. Los reglamentos de la Fundación Wikimedia Inc. están disponible por Internet.
¿Cuáles proyectos mantiene la Fundación?
La Fundación mantiene Wikipedia, la famosa enciclopedia en Internet que se encuentra entre los 15 sitios web más visitados del mundo (finales de 2006). WMF supports Wikipedia, the famous online encyclopedia, among the 15th most visited websites in the world end of 2006. From the founding of Wikipedia in January, 2001, and the incorporation of the Wikimedia Foundation in June, 2003, our growth has been staggering. 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.
However, the Foundation also 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.
Overall, our projects have more than 7.8 million pages, 2.2 million images, and 5 million registered accounts.
Wikitravel, Omegawiki and Wikia are not projects supported by the Foundation.
More information may be found at our projects. For example, 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.
This site includes a complete list of notes from Board meetings till the end of 2005.
In 2006, we switched to a dual system, featuring both meeting minutes (usually not published), and resolutions. We also set up a collection of committees and hired our first Executive Director, Brad Patrick in june 2006. Most of the interaction between board members, staff, committee members, developers and community happens online, on our wikis, on mailing lists, through electronic chat (irc). We however have face to face opportunities, during Wikimania (our annual conference), during board retreats or real life board meetings.
Much to the amazement of most, we only have one office, located in Florida (USA), where 4 of our employees and 1 board member are working. All other board members or staff work "at home". The staff is made of 6 people (end of 2006); however most people helping are volunteers (including board members).
At the end of 2006, major changes in the organisation took place, with a total of 4 board members in 3 months, change of the chair of the Foundation, set up of an advisory board, bylaw revisions etc...
More information about Foundation activity may be found at
- policies
- resolutions
- WMF Annual Report 2006 (which actually features 2004, 2005, 2006 - soon online)
- Founder letter Sept 2004
- Founder letter January 2005
- Founder letter June 2005
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.
In december 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation added two new board members, Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen. Tim Shell chose to resign from the board and is replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede.
As of january 2007, the list of board members is
- Florence Devouard
- Kat Walsh
- Michael Davis
- Erik Moeller
- Jimmy Wales
- Oscar van Dillen
- Jan-Bart de Vreede
Biographies and terms of current 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.
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.
Do you have audited financial statements ?
Our financial statements have been audited for fiscal years 2004, 2005 and 2006 by Gregory Sharer & Stuart [2] and are compliant with generally accepted accounting principles.
Links to the financial statements and management letter:
What is Wikia? Is it part of Wikipedia? Is it one of the Wikimedia Foundation projects?
The Wikimedia Foundation is a registered not-for profit dedicated to the development and promotion of free content. In 2004, Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley founded Wikia,Inc. with the idea of using the same model as the Wikimedia projects to create a vast collection of wikis devoted to content that doesn’t quite fit the model of any Wikimedia project. Among the initial members of Wikia were Jimmy Wales, Angela Beesley, and Michael Davis, three board members of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is, however, a completely separate company.
In some ways Wikia sites are similar to Wikipedia; they are also based on free content, which anyone can edit. In others ways they are different; the content is more specialized, and features fan guides, travel information, how-to wikis, and Uncyclopedia, a popular parody of Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, which is funded by donations, Wikia is funded by investors and by advertising.
Wikimedia and Wikia have a very healthy relationship, and people from one can often be found editing on the other. Until recently, Wikia helped the Wikimedia Foundation get organized by donating office space to it in St. Petersburg, Florida. They are, however, separate companies with different business models.
See CentralWikia:Wikimedia for further details on the relationships between Wikia and Wikimedia.
How to contact the Foundation ?
See the "Contact us" page for details.