Frequently Asked Questions

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

Wikimedia is a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on June 20, 2003. In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board of Trustees 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 wiki software package 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 Wikimedia project is dependent on donations. The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase revenue by finding alternative means of support, including grants and sponsorship.

The name Wikimedia is a portmanteau of wiki and multimedia.

Organization

Bylaws

The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. may be viewed online.

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 of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws). 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 discussions of finding alternate sources of income, such as applying for 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 a significant portion of Wikipedia, such as a Wikipedia 1.0 project. Finally, a membership system is planned for 2005.

For more information about donations, see our fundraising page.

Liabilities

For details on what we have done with donations since the start of 2004, and how we plan to use our funds, see What we use the money for.

One of the main expenses for the Foundation is hardware.

• Description of the hardware that powers Wikimedia : Wikimedia servers, hardware orders
• Frequently updated status of this hardware : Wikimedia hardware status

Six servers are now being hosted in France as squids, with another eleven in the Netherlands. The hosting and bandwidth have been donated.

The Foundation currently spends almost no money on salaries or any other type of employee, consultant, or volunteer compensation (except for Chad Perrin, was is being employed as a hardware assistant in January 2005. Chad is worked for at least one day per week, until March 2005). In the future, the Foundation may reimburse costs, such as travel costs, shipping costs, and phone bills.

Domain registration is another part of Wikimedia's liabilities. The Foundation already owns some of its 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

There are presently three active Wikimedia chapters.

• Wikimedia Deutschland, founded on June 13, 2004
• Wikimédia France, founded on October 23th, 2004
• Wikimedia Italia, founded on June 17th, 2005

Other local chapters are also being planned.

Contacting the Foundation

See the "Contact us" page for details.