Wikimedia Quarto/2/chapter-fr
Wikimédia France ([1]), a French non-profit association, was officially founded on October 23, 2004 in Paris, with 20 founding members. Among the founding members were the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation. At this meeting, the final bylaws were adopted. The goal of Wikimédia France is to promote all Wikimedia projects, with a focus on French language projects. Wikimédia France will also act as a representative of the Wikimedia Foundation in France and other countries, where its help is required. It will not exercise any editorial influence on the French-language Wikipédia, and may intervene only statutorily in the case of legal matters.
The founding members and other interested users are working to establish a set of internal policies for Wikimédia France, in order to further define its goals and methods.
Wikimédia France elected its Board members on October 25th via IRC. Ryo was elected president, Yann, secretary and Shaihulud, treasurer.
The last step is to register the association as a non-profit with the French authorities, and for this it is necessary to have the bylaws signed by all founding members. The last missing signature was Jimbo's. Since the signed bylaws have just been returned to France, it is expected that the association will legally exist in February 2005. This will enable Wikimédia France to function as a legal entity and, for example, to open a bank account. Some early goals will be for the association to be recognized as an organization of "public usefulness" and to have membership fees that are partially deductible from income taxes. After that, the real work of setting up accounts, getting donations and such can begin.
Wikimédia France have had a few occasions to present Wikipedia in different meetings. Please see [2] for more details.
Wikipedia lately received a lot of coverage in French language medias: articles from maintream newspapers Libération and La Tribune de Genève, the radio France-Info, the magazine Univers Mac and many web site reviews.