Wikimedia Foundation
 Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation[1] | |
| Founded | June 20, 2003 |
|---|---|
| Type | 501(c)(3) charitable organization |
| Focus | Free, open content, wiki-based internet projects |
| Location | |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Method | Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior), Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity and Meta-Wiki |
Key people | Florence Nibart-Devouard, Chair of the Board Jimmy Wales, Chairman Emeritus Erik Möller, Executive Secretary Michael E. Davis, Treasurer[2] Kat Walsh, Board member[3] Oscar van Dillen, Board member[4] Jan-Bart de Vreede, Board member[5] Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer |
Revenue | $1,508,039 (Year Ending 6/30/06) |
Employees | 7 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[6][7][8][9][10] Jimmy Wales, who was hitherto 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 is a 501(c)(3) with a vision to bring a free and accurate encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
The goal of the Wikimedia foundation 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.[11]
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.[12] 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.[13] 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, theretofore 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[14].
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.[15] .
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.
Early 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation had a staff of about 10 people. 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.
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. [16]
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.[17] 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. Most recent addition was Vishal Patel, to assist in business development. [18] The number of current staff members is still less than ten.[19]
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.[20]
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 7 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. |
Project coordination
- Meta-Wiki
- Wikimedia project coordination (launched November 2001).
Recent project history
- September 7, 2004: The Wikimedia Commons was launched.
- December 3, 2004: After a brief demonstration phase in November, the English beta version of Wikinews became operational. Wikinews is meant to be a free content news source which allows anybody to report news on a wide variety of subjects.
- April 2005: 501(c)(3) non-profit status granted by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service with the NTEE Code: B60 (Adult, Continuing Education).
- November 2005: Wikimedia awarded membership in the World Technology Network.
Board of Trustees
- Michael E. Davis
- Erik Möller
- Florence Nibart-Devouard
- Oscar van Dillen
- Jan-Bart de Vreede
- Jimmy Wales
- Kat Walsh
References
- ^ Logo designed by Wikipedia user "Neolux"
- ^ Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, last modified October 27, 2006
- ^ Board resolution, December 8, 2006
- ^ Board resolution, December 8, 2006
- ^ Board resolution, December 8, 2006
- ^ Mitchell, Dan (December 24, 2005). "Insider Editing at Wikipedia". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
- ^ Mehegan, David (February 12, 2006). "Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world". Business. The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
- ^
Poe, Marshall (September, 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Peter Meyers (September 20, 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
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. "There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things." Instead, he said, "there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like.
- ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia". ABC News. Associated Press. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
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.
— Brian Bergstein. - ^ 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
- ^ Jimmy Wales (2006-10-04). Charlie Rose (46:22) (internet video) (TV-Series). Google Video: Charlie Rose. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
- ^ "Current staff from the Wikimedia Foundation". The Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
- ^ "Current staff from the Wikimedia Foundation". The Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
- ^ "Current staff from the Wikimedia Foundation". The Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
- ^ Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board
External links
- Wikimedia Foundation website
- Wikimedia Foundation bylaws (PDF file)
- Corporate Charter of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. two page TIFF file located on Florida Department of State, Divisions of Corporations web site
- Public Record for Wikimedia Foundation Inc. from Florida Department of State web site
- Sheldon Rampton's WikiEN-l post
- Financial statements 2004-2005-2006
