Everything about The Wikimedia totally explained
The
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a
non-profit charitable organization headquartered in
San Francisco,
California,
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 . Its flagship project, the
English-language Wikipedia, ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.
The foundation's creation was officially announced by
Wikipedia co-founder
Jimmy Wales, who was running Wikipedia within his company
Bomis, on
June 20,
2003.
Goals
The Wikimedia Foundation falls under section
501(c)(3) of the United States
Internal Revenue Code as a
public charity. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code is B60 (Adult, Continuing Education). The foundation's by-laws declare a statement of purpose of collecting and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
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.
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.
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. In March 2008 the foundation announced its largest donation to date: a three-year, $3 million grant from the
Alfred P. Sloan 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. 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, which also acquired the
domain names
wikimedia.org and
wikimediafoundation.org.
Michael Davis established the "very stringent controls in place regarding all expenses" initially used by Wikipedia/Wikimedia; which included matching every receipt to a credit card item, and numbering, photocopying, scanning and filing in two separate locations: paper and electronic.
In April 2005, the U.S.
Internal Revenue Service approved (by letter) the foundation 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.
On
December 11,
2006 the Wikimedia Foundation board acknowledged that the corporation couldn't become the membership organization 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.
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.
Board of Trustees
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. In late 2004, Wales and Beesley launched a startup company,
Wikia, affiliated with neither Wikimedia nor Bomis. In July 2005, Beesley and Nibart-Devouard were re-elected to the board.
On
July 1,
2006, Beesley resigned from the board effective upon election of her successor, expressing concern about "certain events and tendencies that have arisen within the organization 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. A special election was held in September to finish Beesley's term, ending with the mid-2007 election. The election was won by
Erik Möller.
In October 2006, Nibart-Devouard replaced Wales as chair of the Foundation. On
December 8,
2006, the board expanded to seven people with the appointments of Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen. Effective
December 15,
2006,
Jan-Bart de Vreede was appointed to replace Shell.
In the June 2007 election, Möller and Walsh were reelected; van Dillen, who ran for re-election, was narrowly edged by Frieda Brioschi.
Davis left the board in November 2007. Nibart-Devouard's elected term expires in June 2008. The appointed terms for Wales and de Vreede expire in December 2008. Brioschi's and Walsh's elected terms expire in June 2009.
In December 2007, Möller resigned from the Board of Trustees, and was hired as the foundation's deputy director by the executive director.
In February 2008, Florence Devouard announced the addition of two new board members (1) American lawyer and Chair of the Commmunication Committee, Michael Snow; (2) Lithuanian computer software engineer, MySQL employee, and longtime member of the core tech team, Domas Mituzas.
In April 2008, the board announced a restructuring of its membership, increasing the number of board positions to 10 overall, as follows:
- Three community-elected seats
- Two seats to be selected by the chapters
- One board-appointed 'community founder' seat, to be occupied by Jimmy Wales
- Four board-appointed 'specific expertise' seats
Volunteer committees and positions
In 2004, the foundation appointed Tim Starling as developer liaison to help improve the
MediaWiki software, Daniel Mayer as
chief financial officer (
finance,
budgeting and coordination of fund drives), and
Erik Möller as content partnership coordinator.
In May 2005, the foundation announced the appointment of seven people to official positions:
Brion Vibber as chief technical officer (Vibber was also an employee of the Foundation, with other duties)
Domas Mituzas as hardware officer
Jens Frank as developer liaison
Möller as chief research officer
Danny Wool as grants coordinator
Elisabeth Bauer as press officer
Jean-Baptiste Soufron as lead legal coordinator
Möller resigned in August 2005, due to differences with the board, and was replaced by James Forrester. In February 2007, Forrester resigned, and the board appointed Gregory Maxwell to the position, renamed "chief research coordinator".
In January 2006, the foundation created several committees, including the Communication Committee, in an attempt to further organize activities essentially handled by volunteers at that time. Starling resigned that month to spend more time on his PhD program.
Employees
The functions of the Wikimedia Foundation were, for the first few years, executed almost entirely by volunteers. In 2005, the foundation had only two employees, Danny Wool, a coordinator, and Brion Vibber, a software manager. Though the number of employees has grown, the foundation's staff is still very small, and the bulk of foundation work continues to be done by volunteers.
As of October 4, 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation had five paid employees: two programmers, an administrative assistant, a coordinator handling fundraising and grants, and an interim executive director, Brad Patrick, previously the foundation's general counsel. Patrick ceased his activity as interim director in January 2007, and then resigned from his position as legal counsel, effective April 1, 2007. He was replaced by Mike Godwin as general counsel and legal coordinator in July 2007. Three further technical contractors were also appointed in December 2006: 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 head of communications. Doran had begun working as a part-time bookkeeper in 2006 after being sent by a temporary agency. Doran later left the foundation in July 2007, and Sue Gardner was hired as consultant and special advisor (later CEO). Some months after Doran's departure, it was identified that she was a convicted felon, with a DUI arrest during her tenure at the foundation and a substantial criminal history, including shooting her boyfriend and complicity in credit card forgery. Her departure from the organization was cited as one of the reasons the foundation took about seven months to release its fiscal 2007 financial audit. She was incarcerated at the Middle River Regional Jail near Staunton, Virginia.
Danny Wool, officially the grant coordinator but also largely involved in fundraising and business development, resigned in March 2007. In April 2007, the foundation added a new position, chapter coordinator, and appointed Delphine Ménard, then in the position of volunteer coordinator, to fill it, with Cary Bass appointed to replace Ménard in coordinating volunteer services. In May 2007, Vishal Patel was hired to assist in business development.. In, the foundation appointed three new staff, Veronique Kessler was appointed the new Chief Financial Operating Officer along with replacing Vishal Patel as the new head of business development and appointed as .
As of May 8, 2008, the number of employees had grown to fourteen.
Current Board of Trustees
Florence Nibart-Devouard
Frieda Brioschi
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Jimmy Wales
Kat Walsh
Michael Snow
Domas Mituzas
Stuart West
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. The current members are:
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 |
URL |
Launching date |
Description |
| Wikipedia |
www.wikipedia.org |
2001-01-15 |
Encyclopedia containing more than 9 million articles in 252 languages. |
| Wiktionary |
www.wiktionary.org |
2002-12-12 |
Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations. |
| Wikibooks |
www.wikibooks.org |
2003-07-10 |
Collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials. |
| Wikiquote |
www.wikiquote.org |
2003-07-10 |
Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways. |
| Wikisource |
www.wikisource.org |
2003-11-24 |
Project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain texts. |
| Wikimedia Commons |
commons.wikimedia.org |
2004-09-07 |
Repository of images, sounds, videos and general, containing more than 1,500,000 files. |
| Wikimedia Incubator |
incubator.wikimedia.org |
2006-06-02 |
Used to test possible new Wikimedia projects and new languages for existing projects. |
| Wikispecies |
species.wikimedia.org |
2004-09-13 |
Directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life. |
| Wikinews |
www.wikinews.org |
2004-12-03 |
News source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many countries. |
| Wikiversity |
www.wikiversity.org |
2006-08-15 |
Educational and research materials and activities — in beta phase. |
Finances
The Wikimedia Foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. It is exempt from federal income tax and from state income tax. It isn't a private foundation, and contributions to it qualify as tax-deductible charitable contributions. Both income and expenses nearly doubled in 2007.[ (See also Finance report)
]Local chapters
Wikimedia projects have an international scope. To continue this success on an organizational level, Wikimedia is building an international network of associated organizations.
Local chapters are self-dependent organizations that share the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation and support them within a specified geographical region. They support the foundation, the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia projects in different ways — by collecting donations, organizing local events and projects and spreading the word of Wikimedia, free content and Wiki culture. They also provide the community and potential partners with a point of contact capable of fulfilling specific local needs.
Local chapters are self-dependent associations with no legal control of nor responsibility for the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation and vice versa.
Wikimedia Deutschland
German Wikipedians were the first to form a chapter of Wikimedia outside the United States. Wikimedia Deutschland was formed as Eingetragener Verein (e. V.) (registered association) on June 13, 2004. The chapter organized several Wikipedia presentations, among others at the computer fairs Cebit in 2005, the Systems in Munich 2005 and the bookfair in Leipzig 2005.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Wikimedia'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://wikimedia_foundation.totallyexplained.com">Wikimedia Foundation Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
