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Setting the record straight—WT:Social is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation

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As of late, we have received several questions about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia’s affiliation with WT:Social. The recently launched WT:Social is related to WikiTribune, a venture independently initiated by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation are separate and independent from WT:Social. We have no connection to the social networking site.

The Wikimedia Foundation hosts and runs 11 free knowledge projects for anyone to learn from and contribute to, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the collection of freely-licensed images, videos, and audio files, Wikidata, an open structured free knowledge database, and more.

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and continues to serve on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. He has several other businesses and projects he’s started since founding Wikipedia, including WikiTribune, a for-profit collaborative news platform. Most recently, he relaunched WikiTribune as WT:Social—a paid social networking site based off the collaborative WikiTribune model. You can read more about WT:Social on the WikiTribune website. These projects are not overseen or affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, which strictly runs nonprofit, free knowledge projects.

The word “wiki” refers to a website built using collaborative editing software. Hundreds of organizations and projects with no affiliation with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation also use the term, including wikiHow, Wikileaks, and WikiEducator.

Read more about how the Wikimedia Foundation supports Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

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