The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the parent organization of Wikipedia,
Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, In Memoriam 9/11 (http://sep11.wikipedia.org/), Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies (http://species.wikipedia.org/pac/), Wikinews,
and Nupedia (defunct). It is a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Its existence was officially announced by former Bomis CEO and Wikipedia co-founder
Jimmy Wales on June 20, 2003 [1] (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-June/010690.html).
Foundation goals
The goals of the foundation are 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 managing the already developed multilingual general
encyclopedia Wikipedia, there is 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 resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks
and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks.
The Foundation also manages a memorial collection of articles about the September 11 attacks and the operations of the largely dormant Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content). The continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects
is dependent primarily on donations (http://wikimediafoundation.org/pac/Fundraising). The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase
revenue by finding alternative means of financing, including grants and
sponsorship.
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. It is occasionally criticised for its similarity to the name of Wikipedia which 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. Wikimedia's bandwidth and power are covered by donations to the project from various companies and individuals.
In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed his Bomis 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.
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.
Recent project history
Board of Trustees
- 2004-2005
- Jimmy Wales, Founder
- Angela Beesley
- Michael Davis
- Florence
Nibart-Devouard
- Tim Shell
External links
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