Incorporated: 2003
NAIC: 519190 All Other Information Services; 511210 Software Publishers
SIC: 7372 Prepackaged Software
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., is a nonprofit, charitable organization that owns and supports the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and Wikipedia's offshoots, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, and Wikiversity. Wikimedia Foundation operates with a paid staff of fewer than ten individuals, relying primarily on the efforts of volunteers. The organization is funded through grants and sponsorship, but obtains the bulk of its money from donations. The largest expenditure for the organization is computer hardware, followed by hosting and bandwidth costs. Wikimedia Foundation owns the Wikimedia servers and domain names of its projects, as well as the MediaWiki software that underpins its projects.
Origins
By the time he was 30 years old, Jimmy Dolan Wales never had to work again. He had accumulated a fortune, amassing enough money to spend the rest of his life in retirement and do whatever he pleased. An outdoor enthusiast and avid sailor, Wales could have spent his days camping, hiking, and boating, but he decided to pursue what he referred to in the October 26, 2004, issue of the Guardian as a "completely insane idea." He decided to create a free online encyclopedia.
Wales grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, where his father worked as a grocery store manager and his mother taught school. After finishing high school at age 16, he enrolled at Auburn University, earned an undergraduate degree in finance, and continued his education at the University of Alabama, earning his graduate degree in finance. Next, Wales attended Indiana University, intending to obtain his doctorate degree in finance. He completed his course work, but before he wrote his doctoral dissertation, a job opportunity in Chicago lured him away from Bloomington. Wales joined Chicago Options Associates as a research director and spent six years working as a futures and options trader, speculating on interest rate and foreign currency fluctuations. He enjoyed tremendous success in Chicago, gaining the financial freedom that enabled him to launch a second career as an entrepreneur.
Intrigued by the Internet, Wales started his first company in 1996, an online search portal called Bomis. The company operated a web site, Bomis.com, that sold advertising and original content such as the "Bomis Babe Report," which focused on celebrities, models, and the adult entertainment industry. Financially, the venture never panned out for Wales, only serving to be a subject of controversy for the entrepreneur after he gained fame as Wikipedia's founder. After cutting his ties to Bomis, Wales moved to San Diego, California, in 1998, the point in his life when he began thinking about creating a free encyclopedia. His desire sprang from open-source software such as Linux and Apache, programs that were free to be copied, shared, and adapted by all users. In March 2000, Wales launched Nupedia, a web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts, preferably authors with a doctorate degree related to their subject matter, and licensed as free content. Wales hired Lawrence M. Sanger, who earned a doctorate degree in philosophy from Ohio State University, to be Nupedia's editor-in-chief.
In contrast to Wikipedia, Nupedia was intended to be a for-profit business. Wales expected revenue to be generated by selling advertising on the Nupedia web site. Also in contrast to Wikipedia, Nupedia required writers to submit résumés and it subjected their articles to a seven-step, peer-review process before publication. The venture progressed at a snail's pace, failing to achieve any sort of momentum, another dissimilarity with Wikipedia. According to various accounts of the undertaking, Wales spent between $250,000 and $500,000 on developing Nupedia during its first year in operation, producing fewer than a dozen articles during the period. Wales grew frustrated, as did Sanger, who searched for a solution to the dilemma. In January 2001, Sanger suggested using a wiki, an online collaborative tool, to quicken the pace of article production for Nupedia. He came up with the name Wikipedia for the sideline venture, and Wales launched the experiment that same month.
A wiki was a piece of open-source software that enabled all users to add, delete, and edit content on a web site. The technology was ideal for facilitating collaboration on projects in business and academia, allowing users, without any knowledge of software code, hypertext markup language (HTML), or how to upload files, to share information. The first web site to use a wiki was WikiWikiWeb, launched in 1995 by computer programmer Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham, who started the web site as a complement to the Portland Pattern Repository, a forum for writing and discussing computer pattern languages. Cunningham coined the term wiki, Hawaiian for "quick," drawing his inspiration from the name of the "Wiki-Wiki" shuttle buses at Honolulu International Airport.
For Wales, Cunningham's wiki technology proved ideally suited to the development of an online encyclopedia. The process of creating an entry began with a basic definition of a term or subject, referred to as a "stub." The stub was expanded by clicking "edit" and typing ordinary text, a process that could be repeated countless times by countless users, thereby expanding and refining the text through a series of additions and revisions. In the process of writing text, a user automatically created hyperlinks by capitalizing words placed together, such as the camel case "GreatDepression," which created a link to an entry with Great Depression as its title. If the entry did not exist, the link was replaced by a question mark, enabling the user, with a click on the question mark, to write an entry on the Great Depression, which, through the capabilities of wiki technology, would be expanded and refined by subsequent visitors. Wiki technology became the driving force propelling Wikipedia's growth, establishing a framework that fostered the speedy creation of hyperlinked content.
It was not long before it became evident which model, Nupedia or Wikipedia, was superior in producing content. Nupedia, which vetted its authors and reviewed their work, never materialized as an online encyclopedia of any scope and during its three-year life span, 24 articles were produced. Wikipedia, which allowed anyone to write, add, and delete content, became an Internet phenomenon, attracting a genuine global community of loyal supporters and contributors whose commitment convinced Wales to change the role played by the wiki-based entity. Instead of acting as a feeder of content to Nupedia, Wikipedia became the primary project, one that Wales decided would be an independent nonprofit organization.
Development of a Wiki Empire: 2002-04
As word spread of Wikipedia, the project began to grow at an exponential pace. Individuals from across the United States, and soon, from countries across the globe, began contributing to the breadth and depth of the information contained on the pages of the Wikipedia.org web site. A new online community of "Wikipedians" emerged, each volunteering their time to write, edit, and debate about any subject matter that came to the collective's mind. Wikipedians produced several hundred new articles per day during the first two years of its existence, an output that thoroughly vanquished the efforts produced under the Nupedia banner. Wales sensed the escalating interest in the way a wiki-based information system functioned and he soon broadened his vision of what he could do with wiki web sites. Wikipedia began surfacing in other languages, moving toward its ultimate goal of becoming a repository of all knowledge from all cultures. Wales also branched out into other areas, affixing the wiki prefix to other projects that an online community could sustain. In 2003, after the English version of Wikipedia reached the milestone of 100,000 articles, Wales formed Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit entity responsible for governing all of his wiki-based projects and for developing the core MediaWiki software that underpinned each project. The company, like Wikipedia, was nonprofit, operating with one paid employee, not Wales, during its first few years in business. The size of Wales's wiki world was measured not in the size of the company, but in the tens of thousands of volunteers who made Wikimedia Foundation similar in size to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.
After spending an estimated $500,000 to fund Wikipedia during its first three years in operation, Wales cast Wikimedia Foundation in the role of financier. Wikimedia Foundation obtained money through grants and through donations, primarily subsisting on contributions of less than $100 from the legions of Wikipedians who supported the project. Wikimedia Foundation also assumed responsibility for funding Wales's other wiki-based projects. The first to emerge was Wiktionary, a project to create free content dictionaries and thesauri in every language, beginning with the launch of an English version in December 2002. In July 2003, two more wiki-based products debuted, Wikiquote, a repository of quotations, mnemonics, proverbs, and slogans, and Wikibooks, established to assemble a collection of free textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated public domain books. Next, Wikisource, an archive of classics and legal texts, appeared in November 2003, followed by the debut in September 2004 of Wikimedia Commons, a repository of free video, images, and music.
One Million Articles by 2005
Additional wiki-based projects followed, including Wikiversity, Wikispecies, and Wikinews, but Wikipedia stood out from the rest, representing the flagship property governed by Wikimedia Foundation. The number of articles produced by the encyclopedia's all-volunteer workforce began to increase exponentially after 2003, as the body of work expanded at a rate of between 1,000 and 3,000 articles per day. By early 2004, when Wikipedia was available in 50 languages, there were 500,000 articles available, five times the total available a year earlier. The number of contributors by 2004 numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but the core community, according to Wales's estimation, included 200 intensely devoted Wikipedians and 2,000 other individuals who averaged more than 100 edits per month. Beyond that layer of support, another 10,000 individuals averaged more than five edits per month. With an army of contributors fleshing out Wikipedia's coverage by the minute, the encyclopedia reached one million articles by September 2005, when 189 different language versions of the project existed.
Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia in the history of the world. No one could deny that a wiki-based system excelled at producing enormous amounts of content in a short time, but there were numerous critics who lambasted Wikipedia for the quality of its content. The same freedom of access that enabled the encyclopedia to grow at a furious pace exposed its content to bias, inaccuracies, and vandalism. Wales responded to critics by stressing Wikipedia was a work in progress, constantly being refined and policed by the vast number of volunteers who made the encyclopedia the phenomenon that it was. Any user had the freedom to contribute to Wikipedia, but volunteer administrators, stewards, and developers maintained a vigilant presence, deleting instances of vandalism, objecting to subjective passages, and requiring contributors to provide external sources to support contentious assertions. Opposing sides on any topic resolved their differences by debating their positions in discussion areas, using wiki technology to ferret out inaccuracies and biases that ultimately and theoretically resulted in an accurate, complete, and objective entry. Malicious statements, Wales argued, were deleted within minutes, inaccurate and poorly written entries were altered and improved by the hundreds of thousands of eyes scrutinizing the encyclopedia's development. There were instances when nefarious or inaccurate content went, for a time, unobserved by the throng of Wikipedians, but this did not seem to temper devotion to the project. Thus, Wikipedia was propelled forward, making the encyclopedia a collection of content no one could ignore.
In the years ahead, the fate of the wiki-based projects watched over by Wikimedia Foundation depended on the dedication of volunteers, the volunteers who contributed and monitored content and the volunteers who composed Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees. The board of trustees managed the foundation, supervised the disposition and solicitation of donations, and wielded the ultimate corporate authority over the entire organization. Beginning in mid-2004, the board of trustees included two individuals elected from the ranks of Wikipedians, a formal acknowledgment of the vital role contributors played. One of the contributors elected in June 2004, Florence Nibart-Devouard, was elected chairwoman of the board of trustees in October 2006 (Wales served as chairman emeritus). Nibart-Devouard, whose term expired in June 2008, headed an organization with an annual operating budget of approximately $3 million and seven salaried employees, figures that belied the stature of the wiki-based projects under her control. Wikipedia, one of the ten most visited web sites in the world, reached two million articles in September 2007. Wikimedia Foundation's other projects were expanding by the hour as well, ensuring that Nibart-Devouard and her successors would be busy managing Wales's wiki world for years to come.
Principal Subsidiaries
Wikimedia Deutschland-Gesellschaft zur Forderung Freien Wissens e.V. (Germany); Wikimedia France; Wikimedia Italia-Societa per la Diffusione della Conoscenza Libera (Italy); Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland (Netherlands); Stowarzyszenie Wikimeida Polksa (Poland); Wikimedia Cpbuje (Serbia); Wikimedia CH-Verein zur Forderung Freien Wissens (Switzerland); Wiki Education Resources Ltd. (U.K.).
Principal Competitors
Answers Corporation; Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.; IAC Search & Media, Inc.
Further Reading
Barnett, Cynthia, "Wiki Mania," Florida Trend, September 2005, p. 62.
"Collaborative Content--The Wikipedia Phenomenon," Information World Review, December 6, 2005, p. 38.
Corcoran, Elizabeth, "The Answer Man," Forbes, September 5, 2005, p. 122.
Frewin, Laura, "Something Wiki This Way Comes," Computer Active, November 9, 2006.
Hammersley, Ben, "Online: Common Knowledge: Wikipedia Is the Web's Encyclopedia," Guardian, January 30, 2003, p. 6.
Jensen, Brennen, "Access for All," Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 29, 2006.
London, Simon, "Web of Words Challenges Traditional Encyclopedias," Financial Times, July 28, 2004, p. 18.
Mandaro, Laura, "Wikipedia Works on Web," Investor's Business Daily, June 7, 2004, p. A4.
Waldman, Simon, "G2: Who Knows?" Guardian, October 26, 2004, p. 2.
— Jeffrey L. Covell
