Kesyon ke anpil moun mande

Fondasyon Wikimedia Inc. se manman òganizatè plizyè pwojè lib tankou gwo toro Wikipedya a, ansiklopedi lib anliy ki genyen plizyè tit ak rekonpans.

Ki misyon pou fondasyon an ?

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free content license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

Are you a charity?

Wikimedia is a non-profit charitable corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Fully audited, The Wikimedia Foundation is now listed as a charitable organization at Guidestar and its partner sites. The Wikimedia Foundation has 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States.

The existence of the Wikimedia Foundation was officially announced by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on June 20, 2003. The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. are available online.

Which projects do you support?

WMF supports Wikipedia, the famous online encyclopedia, which was among the 10 most visited websites in the world in mid-2007. From the founding of Wikipedia in January 2001, and the incorporation of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2003, our growth has been staggering. The English-language Wikipedia, our first project, has expanded from 135,000 articles at the time of incorporation to 1.8 million articles today. Wikipedias in 8 other languages boast over 250,000 articles of their own.

However, the Foundation also operates several projects beside Wikipedia, such as Wikimedia Commons, the repository of free images and other media, which surpassed 1 million images in November 2006. Wiktionary, the free dictionary, has 8 dictionaries with more than 50,000 entries, three of which have more than 200,000 definitions. Wikisource, an original source repository, is nearing 150,000 pages of content. Wikiquote (quotations), Wikibooks (collaboratively written books), Wikinews (citizen journalism), and Wikiversity (curriculum development) all continue to grow along the same trend line.

Overall, our projects have more than 7.8 million pages, 2.2 million images, and 5 million registered accounts.

Wikitravel, Omegawiki and Wikia are separate wikis which are not managed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

More information may be found at our projects. For example, here is a report on the state of Wikisource.

How is the Foundation run?

The Wikimedia Board of Trustees manages the nonprofit organization and supervises the solicitation and disposition of donations. The Board of Trustees is 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.

This site includes a complete list of notes from Board meetings till the end of 2005.

In 2006, we switched to a dual system, featuring both meeting minutes (usually not published), and resolutions. We also set up a collection of committees and hired our first Executive Director, Brad Patrick, in June 2006. Most of the interaction between board members, staff, committee members, developers and community happens online, on our wikis, on mailing lists, and through electronic chat (IRC). We do, however, have face to face opportunities, during Wikimania (our annual conference), during board retreats or real life board meetings.

We have only one office, located in Florida (USA), where several of our employees are working. All other board members and staff work remotely. The staff is eleven people (as of mid-2007); this does not include the many volunteers, from board members to proofreaders.

At the end of 2006, major changes in the organization took place, including four new board members in three months, change of the chair of the Foundation, setup of an advisory board, and revised bylaws.

More information about Foundation activity may be found at

Policies
Resolutions
WMF Annual Report 2006 (which actually features 2004, 2005, 2006 - soon online)
Founder letter Sept 2004
Founder letter January 2005
Founder letter June 2005

Who are the members of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees?

In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation and later made a call for candidates for community representatives [1]. 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 reelected the following year in July 2005.

In July 2006, Angela Beesley announced her resignation and in September 2006, Erik Möller was elected as her replacement. In December 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation appointed two new board members, Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen. Tim Shell chose to resign from the board and was replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede. In July 2007, an election was held for the expiring terms of Möller, Walsh, and van Dillen. Möller and Walsh both kept their seats, and van Dillen was replaced with Frieda Brioschi.

As of July 2007, the list of board members is

Florence Devouard
Kat Walsh
Michael Davis
Erik Möller
Jimmy Wales
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Frieda Brioschi

Biographies and terms of current board members may be found at Board.

How does the Foundation serve its mission?

First, the Wikimedia Foundation owns the Wikimedia servers along with the domain names and trademarks of all Wikimedia projects and the MediaWiki software. It generally supports all the costs of having the projects up and in working order. Contributors retain the copyright to their own content but must release it under a free license, most commonly the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing anyone to continue to use it for any purpose, in perpetuity. Through this principle of free content, we ensure that our work will never be lost to humankind.

The Foundation also plays an important innovative part in further developing the projects, connecting people, promoting collaboration with other parties, and so on. In particular, each of our projects has unique technological requirements, which are met by our small but efficient team of software developers. The highest priority in 2007 will be a renewed focus on quality assurance. This will include mechanisms to identify trusted versions of content such as Wikipedia articles.

Ensuring success in all endeavors of the Foundation will make it necessary to collaborate with organizations and companies around the planet. Our financial planning includes professional staff who will pursue such strategic partnerships, as well as coordinate our growing network of chapter organizations in various countries.

How is the revenue spent?

The majority of WMF expenditures support our programs. Foremost are our expenses for the hardware and bandwidth that keep our websites up and running.

The single greatest expenditure for WMF is hardware, followed by hosting and bandwidth costs. The WMF has seen its inventory of computer hardware increase steadily to meet demand. Here is a frequently updated status of this hardware: Wikimedia hardware status.

The main reason for the increase is our growth in traffic. At the end of the year 2006, Comscore listed "Wikipedia Sites" as the number six site in the world, measured by unique visitors (*). Wikipedia, our flagship website, received about 285,000 page views per minute. The WMF is concerned about the capitalization and operational commitments necessary to keep these systems running reliably. These costs alone will exceed $2.5 million in the year 2007.
(*) Excludes traffic from mobile phones, PDAs, and public computers such as Internet cafes.

Domain registration and trademarks are another part of Wikimedia's expenditures. The Foundation already owns some of its active and secondary/tangentially-related domain names, while others are still free or already owned.

Due to the increase in office staff, administrative costs increased. Overall, however, the allocation of expenses for fundraising is low, due to WMF's reliance on online donations for the majority of its revenue. WMF does not engage in "direct mail" advertising campaigns. Given WMF's presence online, it makes sense to communicate and ask for donations in the same virtual space. To date, it has been effective.

Costs have been kept low in the past three years, in particular because the largest majority of people helping are volunteers.

Where does the money come from?

As of July 2007, Wikimedia is funded primarily through private donations, but also through several grants and gifts of servers and hosting (see benefactors).

The WMF receives donations from more than 50 countries around the world. Most of the donations to WMF come from English-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Over half of these donations are anonymous. Though individual donations are relatively small, their sheer numbers have ensured our success.

The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase revenue by finding alternative means of support, including grants and sponsorship as well as selling WikiReaders (textbook or PDF versions of articles from Wikipedia). There has also been discussion of selling a print version of a significant portion of Wikipedia, such as a "Wikipedia 1.0" project.

We are presently not using advertising as a source of revenue.

The Wikimedia Foundation has 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States. Donations made from other nations may also be tax deductible. See deductibility of donations for details. Please see our fundraising page for details of making donations via PayPal, MoneyBookers or by postal mail. For all other types of donation, please contact Sue Gardner at sgardner at wikimedia.org.

Do you have audited financial statements?

Our financial statements have been audited for fiscal years 2004, 2005 and 2006 by Gregory Sharer & Stuart [2] and are compliant with generally accepted accounting principles.

Links to the financial statements and management letter:

What is Wikia? Is it part of Wikipedia? Is it one of the Wikimedia Foundation projects?

The Wikimedia Foundation is a registered not-for profit dedicated to the development and promotion of free content. In 2004, Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley founded Wikia,Inc. with the idea of using the same model as the Wikimedia projects to create a vast collection of wikis devoted to content that does not fit the model of any Wikimedia project. Among the initial members of Wikia were Jimmy Wales, Angela Beesley, and Michael Davis, three board members of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is, however, a completely separate company.

In some ways Wikia sites are similar to Wikipedia: both offer free content which anyone can edit. In others ways they are different: Wikia tends to have more specialized content, and features fan guides, travel information, how-to wikis, and Uncyclopedia, a popular parody of Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, which is funded by donations, Wikia is funded by investors and by advertising.

Wikimedia and Wikia have a healthy relationship, and people from one often contribute to the other. Until recently, Wikia helped the Wikimedia Foundation get organized by donating office space in St. Petersburg, Florida. They are, however, separate companies with different business models.

See CentralWikia:Wikimedia for further details on the relationships between Wikia and Wikimedia.

How can I contact the Foundation?

See the "Contact us" page for details.