For the wiki software used and developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, see
MediaWiki.
| Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. |
Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation |
| Type |
501(c)(3) charitable organization |
| Founded |
June 20, 2003 |
| Headquarters |
St. Petersburg, Florida,
USA  |
| Key people |
Florence Nibart-Devouard, Chair of the Board
Jimmy Wales, Chairman Emeritus
Erik Möller, Executive Secretary
Michael E. Davis, Treasurer[1]
Kat Walsh, Board member[2]
Frieda Brioschi, Board member[2]>
Jan-Bart de Vreede, Board member[2]
Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer |
| Area served |
Worldwide |
| Focus |
Free, open content, wiki-based internet projects |
| Method |
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior), Wikisource, Wikimedia
Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity and Meta-Wiki |
| Revenue |
$1,508,039 (Year Ending 6/30/06) |
| Employees |
12 paid employees |
| Website |
wikimediafoundation.org |
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization based in St.
Petersburg, Florida, USA, and organized under the
laws of the state of Florida. It operates several online collaborative projects including
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior), Wikisource, Wikimedia
Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Meta-Wiki.
Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia co-founder[3][4] Jimmy Wales, who was running
Wikipedia within his company Bomis, on June 20, 2003. Its approval by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, by
letter in April 2005, as an educational foundation in the category "Adult, Continuing Education" means all contributions to the
Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes.
Foundation goals
The Wikimedia Foundation corporation falls under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code as a public charity. Its
National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code is B60 (Adult, Continuing Education).[5][6] The
Foundation's by-laws declares a statement of purpose of bringing a free and accurate encyclopedia to every single person on the
planet.[7]
The Wikimedia foundation's stated goal is to develop and maintain
open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full
contents of those projects to the public free of charge.[8]
In addition to the multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Foundation
manages a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named
Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named
Wikiquote, a repository of source texts in any language named Wikisource, and a collection of e-book texts for students (such as
textbooks and annotated public domain books) named
Wikibooks. Wikijunior is a subproject of
Wikibooks that specializes in books for children.
Foundation operations
The continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects is dependent mostly on donations but the Wikimedia Foundation
also increases its revenue by alternative means of funding such as grants, sponsorship,
services (datafeed) and brand merchandising.
Foundation history and growth
The name "Wikimedia" was coined by Sheldon Rampton
in a post to the English Wikipedia's mailing list in March 2003.[9] The name has been criticized for its similarity to the name of Wikipedia and the software it runs on, MediaWiki; this sometimes leads to
confusion among people new to the project.
With the Foundation's announcement, Wales also transferred ownership of all Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Nupedia domain names to Wikimedia along with the copyrights for all
materials related to these projects that were created by Bomis employees or Wales himself. The
computer equipment used to run all the Wikimedia projects was also donated by Wales to the Foundation. The domain names wikimedia.org and wikimediafoundation.org were secured for the Foundation by Wikipedia contributor Daniel
Mayer.
In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed his business partners Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board 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; they were re-elected in July 2005. Wales and Beesley later launched a startup company, Wikia, which is affiliated with neither Wikimedia nor Bomis.
Later, other official positions were developed: Tim Starling was appointed Developer Liaison to help improve the organisation
of the development of the MediaWiki software, and Daniel Mayer was appointed Chief Financial
Officer to help keep a budget and coordinate fund drives. Erik Möller had been the Chief Research Officer, but resigned in August
2005 due to differences with the board.[10] James Forrester
was subsequently appointed to the position.
In January, the Wikimedia Foundation created several committees (eg, the comcom, aka communication committee) in an attempt to
further organize the activities of the Foundation, essentially handled by volunteers at that time. In spring 2005, the Foundation
only had two employees, Danny Wool and Brion Vibber.
On June 16, 2006, Brad Patrick, heretofore a practicing
attorney engaged in some pro bono work with
the Foundation starting in the fall of 2005, was named as general counsel and interim
executive director; in the latter capacity, Patrick was designated to assist the
Board in its search for a permanent executive director[11].
On July 1, 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board
effective upon election of her successor, expressing concern about "certain events and tendencies that have arisen within the
organisation since the start of this year," but stating her intent to continue to participate in the Wikimedia projects, and in
the formation of an Australian chapter. After her resignation, a special election was held and the winner, Erik Möller, will
finish Angela Beesley's term, ending with the ordinary 2007 election.[12] .
In October 2006, Florence Devouard replaced Jimmy Wales as chairwoman of the
Wikimedia Foundation. The board was soon after expanded to include Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen, appointed to the Board on
December 8, 2006. Jan-Bart de Vreede was appointed to replace
Tim Shell from December 15, 2006.
On December 11, 2006 the Wikimedia Foundation board
acknowledged that the corporation could not become the membership organisation initially planned but never implemented due to an
inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida Statute. Accordingly the bylaws were amended to remove all reference
to membership rights and activities. The decision to change the bylaws was passed by the Board unanimously.
Brad Patrick ceased his activity as interim director in January 2007, and later resigned from his position of Legal Counsel,
effective April 1 2007. Danny Wool, officially grant coordinator,
but generally largely involved in fundraising and business development, resigned mid-March 2007. Mike Godwin was hired as general counsel and legal coordinator in July 2007. [13]
On September 25, 2007 the Wikimedia Foundation board
acknowledged that the operations would be moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in
late 2007. Major considerations cited for choosing San Francisco were proximity to like-minded organizations and potential
partners as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel than is available from St. Petersburg.[14][15][16]
Employees
The functions of the Wikimedia Foundation are executed almost entirely by volunteers. As of October 4, 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation had 5 paid employees: two programmers
(software manager Brion Vibber in California and server administrator Chad Perrin in Tampa); "to answer the phones",
administrative assistant Barbara Brown, to handle fundraising and grants, Danny Wool; and to manage, interim executive director
Brad Patrick. [17]
As of December 8, 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation's list of
current staff also names three other technical independent contractors (part-time hardware manager Kyle Anderson in Tampa,
full-time MediaWiki software developer Tim Starling, and part-time networking coordinator Mark Bergsma). In January 2007 Carolyn
Doran was named Chief Operating Officer and Sandy Ordonez came on board as Communication Manager.[18] The Foundation added a new position, Chapter Coordinator, and
appointed Delphine Ménard, then a position of Volunteer Coordinator, in April 2007, and appointed Cary Bass to fill it. In May 2007 Vishal Patel was hired
to assist in business development.[19] The latest two
employees are Sue Gardner,
Consultant and Special Advisor, and Mike Godwin, General Counsel, both hired in July 2007.
The number of current full-time staff members is fewer than ten.[20]
Advisory Board
The Advisory Board is an
international network of experts who have agreed to give the Foundation meaningful help on a regular basis in many different
areas, including law, organizational development, technology, policy, and outreach.[21]
Wikimedia coordination and projects
Wikimedia projects
The launch dates shown below are when official domains were established for the projects and/or beta versions were launched;
preliminary test versions at other domains are not considered.
| Name |
Launching date |
Description |
| Wikipedia |
2001-01-15 |
Encyclopedia containing more than 8 million articles in 250 languages. |
| Wiktionary |
2002-12-12 |
Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations. |
| Wikibooks |
2003-07-10 |
Collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials. |
| Wikiquote |
2003-07-10 |
Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways. |
| Wikisource |
2003-11-24 |
Project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain texts. |
| Wikimedia Commons |
2004-09-07 |
Repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing more than 1,500,000 files. |
| Wikimedia Incubator |
? |
Used to test possible new Wikimedia projects and new languages for existing projects. |
| Wikispecies |
2004-09-13 |
Directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life. |
| Wikinews |
2004-12-03 |
News source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many countries. |
| Wikiversity |
2006-08-15 |
Courses, course materials, tests. Announced to go into beta testing, little has
been officially decided on its structure. |
Recent project history
Board of Trustees
The foundation maintains a current list online.[1]
Barring resignations, this list should be current until December 2007.
References
- ^ a b Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, last modified October
27, 2006
- ^ a b c Board resolution,
December 8 2006
- ^ Peter Meyers. "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", New
York Times, September 20 2001. Retrieved on
2007-07-31. “It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let
people work," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that
donates the computer resources for the project.”
- ^ Bergstein, Brian. "Sanger says he co-started
Wikipedia", ABC News, Associated Press,
March 25 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-31. “The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy
Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly
controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about
it.”
- ^ NTEE Classification System
- ^ Adult Education
- ^ Statement of purpose
- ^ Wikimedia mission statement
- ^ Wikipedia English
mailing list message, March 2003.
- ^ Wikimedia
Foundation mailing list message, August 2005.
- ^ Wikimedia Foundation press release
- ^ Wikimedia
Foundation mailing list message
- ^ Mailing list
post by the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees announcing the appointment.
- ^ Carlos Moncada
(25 September 2007). Wikimedia Foundation Moving To Another Bay Area. The Tampa
Tribune.
- ^ Richard Mullins
(26 September 2007). Online Encyclopedia To Leave St. Petersburg
For San Francisco. The Tampa Tribune.
- ^ Ryan Kim (10 October 2007). Wikipedia team plans move to San Francisco. San Francisco
Chronicle.
- ^ Jimmy Wales. Charlie Rose
(46:22) (internet video) [TV-Series]. Google Video: Charlie Rose. Retrieved on 2006-12-08.
- ^ Current staff from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on
2006-12-08.
- ^ Current staff from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on
2007-04-23.
- ^ Current staff from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on
2007-07-11.
- ^ Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
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Foundationzh-yue:維基媒體基金會
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