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The Way the World Tells its Story

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Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2010–2011

The Gypsy Girl mosaic fragment from the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, Turkey, is an example of the global effort to capture images of important cultural artifacts and make them available to all on Wikipedia. This fragment, made up of many small pieces, also can be seen as symbolic of the collaborative story-telling method used by hundreds of thousands of Wikimedian volunteers to document the "sum of all human knowledge."

Everywhere...

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In Rennes, France, ten large installations representing Wikipedia entries for local landmarks were posted around the city in celebration of Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary. These signs were placed so as to spotlight places like the opera house, the Parliament, and a street named after former mayor Jean Janvier (left).

Letter from the Directors

Back in January 2001, few people could have imagined the extraordinary impact of what was then just a tiny project driven by a big idea. But ten years later, we find ourselves at the center of a free knowledge movement built around our flagship project, Wikipedia, which has become the most important collaboratively created repository of knowledge in history.


Today, Wikimedia volunteers around the world work in more than 280 languages to document the stories of their communities and cultures, past and present. During 2011, for example, hundreds of volunteers contributed to the articles on the Arab Spring rebellions, capturing one of the major stories of our time as it unfolded.

The Wikimedia Foundation is part of a broad global network of individuals, organizations, chapters, clubs and communities who together work to create Wikipedia, the most powerful example of volunteer collaboration and open content sharing in the world today. In 2010–11, the bulk of the Foundation’s spending was focused towards putting in place solid technical and organizational infrastructure. In 2011–12, the majority of spending goes towards growing, strengthening and increasing the diversity of the editing community, simplifying our wiki-editing interface, making investments to grow the projects’ readers and editors in key geographic areas such as India, Brazil and the Middle East and North Africa, and improving our presence on mobile devices.

Over the past year, more than 500,000 people donated to the Wikimedia Foundation, giving us more than $23 million USD. Thank you for your incredible generosity, and for your outpouring of support and love for Wikipedia and its sister projects, enabling the work of nearly 100,000 active editors. We owe you a huge debt of gratitude.

The Wikimedia Foundation especially wants to thank the editing community. Your work is essential, and it is what donors are enjoying and supporting: thank you for everything you do. A big thanks as well to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and Advisory Board, and a warm welcome to our new Advisory Board members Veronique Kessler and Jessamyn West.

Sincerely,

Sue Gardner Executive Director

Ting Chen, Chair Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees


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