Wikimedia Foundation

Fast Facts
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Type	501(c)(3) Charitable organization
Founded	St. Petersburg, Florida, USA June 20, 2003 (2003-06-20) (5 years ago)
Headquarters	San Francisco, California  United States
Key people	Florence Nibart-Devouard, Chair of the Board Jimmy Wales, Chairman Emeritus
Areas served	Worldwide
Focus	Free, open content, wiki-based internet projects
Method	Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior), Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity and MetaWiki
Revenue	US$2,734,909 (2007)
Employees	19 paid employee positions
Website	wikimediafoundation.org

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization that operates several online collaborative projects, the most popular of which is undoubtedly Wikipedia. Headquartered at Stillman Street, San Francisco, California, USA, the name "Wikimedia" has been criticized for its similarity to the name of Wikipedia and the software it runs on, MediaWiki as this sometimes leads to confusion among people new to the project.

2.   The Foundation's creation was officially announced in 2003 by Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who was running Wikipedia within his company Bomis. With the 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. The computer equipment used to run the Wikimedia projects was also donated by Wales to the Foundation. The Foundation also acquired the domain names wikimedia.org and wikimediafoundation.org.

3.   The Wikimedia Foundation's stated goal 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. In addition to the multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Foundation manages:

• Wiktionary, a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus;
• Wikiquote, an encyclopedia of quotations;
• Wikisource, a repository of source texts in any language;
• Wikibooks, a collection of e-book texts for students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books); and
• Wikijunior, a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children.

4.   Wikimedia Foundation operates with predominantly volunteer staff. In December 2006, three technical contractors were appointed: Kyle Anderson, part-time hardware manager in Tampa, Florida; Tim Starling, full-time MediaWiki software developer; and Mark Bergsma, part-time networking coordinator.

5.   Wikimedia Foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. It is exempt from federal income tax and from state income tax. As it is not a private foundation, contributions to it qualify as charitable contribution deductions. Apart from public contributions and grants, the Foundation also increases its revenue by alternative means of funding such as grants, sponsorship, services (datafeed) and brand merchandising. At the beginning of 2006, the net assets were US$270,000. During the year, the organization received a total support and revenue of US$1,510,000, with concurrent expenses of US$790,000.

6.   The Wikimedia projects have an international scope, and their outreach has already made a significant impact throughout the world. To continue this success on an organizational level, Wikimedia is building an international network of associated organizations, called local chapters. The local chapters are self-dependent associations with no legal control of or responsibility for the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation and vice versa. They support the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia projects in different ways — by collecting donations, organizing local events and projects and spreading the word of Wikimedia, Free Content and Wiki culture. They also provide the community and potential partners with a point of contact capable of fulfilling specific local needs.  more... at Wikipedia