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Abbreviation | WMF |
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Founded | June 20, 2003 St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. |
Founder | Jimmy Wales |
Type | 501(c)(3), charitable organization |
20-0049703[1] | |
Focus | Free, open-content, wiki-based Internet projects |
Location |
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Area served | Worldwide |
Products | Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, MediaWiki |
Membership | Board-only |
Key people | María Sefidari (Chair of the board)[3] Katherine Maher (Executive director) |
Revenue | |
Expenses |
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Endowment (2019) | US $35 million[5] |
Employees | ~301 staff/contractors (as of August 8, 2018[update])[6] |
Volunteers | Wikimedia community |
Website | WikimediaFoundation.org |
The Wikimedia Foundation is an American non-profit foundation. Their main headquarters is in San Francisco in the United States. The Wikimedia Foundation runs many projects using the wiki idea and the MediaWiki software. These projects include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Meta-Wiki.[7]
There are many other wikis related to the foundation, but these are mostly smaller projects. They include the Wikimedia Foundation wiki, the MediaWiki wiki, the Test Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Incubator, Bugzilla, and the Wikimania wiki.
The foundation's creation was officially announced by Wikipedia co-founder[8][9] Jimmy Wales, who was running Wikipedia within his company Bomis, on June 20, 2003.
The foundation gets most of its funds from donations, as it is a nonprofit. It also looks for grants. Some companies have helped Wikimedia by giving free computer hardware, and by hosting servers. Since people can write the wikis, Wikimedia projects are free to use. Funds are used to run computer servers and to pay staff. The Foundation had 700 employees in 2023.
In 2013, Sue Gardner was the executive director.[10]
In 2015, Patricio Lorente was the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board.[11]
In 2016, Katherine Maher became the executive director.
In 2018, María Sefidari is chair of the board.[3]
In 2022 Maryana Iskander became Chief Executive Officer, replacing Katherine Maher.
With their gifts, the Endowment has now increased to more than $35 million and have moved us that much closer to our goal of $100 million.
It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project.
The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial — Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it.
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