According to the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...
, the Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the
Wikimedia projects
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundati ...
. This community directly builds and administers the projects. It is committed to using
open standard
An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...
s and
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
.
First created around and by
Wikipedia's community of volunteer editors, it has since expanded to other projects, including
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...
and
Wikidata
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...
, and volunteer software engineers and developers contributing to
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...
.
Projects
Content projects
As of 2021, Wikimedia's content projects include:
*
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
, a web-based encyclopedia
*
Meta-Wiki
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
, a place to discuss and coordinate projects and ideas across wikis
*
Wikibooks
Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that an ...
, educational textbooks
*
Wikidata
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...
, a shared repository of structured data, accessible by the other projects
*
Wikifunctions
Wikifunctions is a collaboratively edited catalog of computer functions to enable the creation, modification, and reuse of source code. It is closely related to Abstract Wikipedia, an extension of Wikidata to create a language-independent vers ...
, a catalog of functions and source code. It is designed to support Abstract Wikipedia, a language-independent version of Wikipedia using structured data.
*
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...
, a shared repository of media like images, videos and sounds, accessible by the other projects
*
Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be ...
, news articles
*
Wikiquote
Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the project's objective is to produce collaboratively a vast refer ...
, a collection of quotations
*
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually rep ...
, a library of source texts and documents
*
Wikispecies
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive open content catalogue of all species; the project is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wa ...
, a taxonomic catalogue of species
*
Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...
, educational material
*
Wikivoyage
Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has ...
, a travel guide
*
Wiktionary
Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a number ...
, a dictionary
Infrastructure and interface projects
Other supporting projects in the Wikimedia movement include
*
Kiwix
Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia Foundati ...
, a community project for offline access to the content projects
*
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...
, the open source platform for the projects
*
Toolforge, a community space for hosting software projects that need access to the cluster
*
Volunteer Response Team
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read referen ...
, community handling email inquiries
*
Wikimedia cloud services, a space for shared cloud computing, built on
OpenStack
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software plat ...
Wikitech a community of developers with a wiki and mailing list
Organizations
Project communities
The Wikimedia community includes a number of communities devoted to single wikis.
Meta community
A multilingual cross-project community developed on the Meta-wiki, where translation and governance discussions happen. A number of other communities and wikis spun out of this, including Outreach and Strategy wikis, and proposals for Commons and Wikidata.
Wikipedia community
The Wikipedia community is the community of contributors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It consists of editors (contributors), some operating
Wikipedia bots
Wikipedia bots are Internet bots (computer programs) that perform simple, repetitive tasks in Wikipedia. One prominent example of an internet bot used in Wikipedia is Lsjbot, which generated millions of short articles across various language edit ...
, and
administrators
Administrator or admin may refer to:
Job roles Computing and internet
* Database administrator, a person who is responsible for the environmental aspects of a database
* Forum administrator, one who oversees discussions on an Internet forum
* N ...
. The
Arbitration Committee
On Wikimedia Foundation projects, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is a binding dispute resolution panel of editors. Each of Wikimedia's projects are editorially autonomous and independent, and some of them have established their own ArbComs w ...
(or ArbCom) is a court of last resort for disputes on Wikipedia.
Wikipedians in residence
Wikipedians in residence are Wikipedians and Wikimedians who collaborate with a cultural institution to help integrate its work into the projects. They can be volunteer or salaried, part- or full-time.
Thematic organizations
Thematic organizations are charities, similar to chapters, founded to support Wikimedia projects in a subject focal area. there are two such organizations.
[
]
Wikimedia chapters
National and regional community groups have incorporated chapters, charitable organizations that support Wikimedia projects and their participants in specified countries and geographical regions. there are 39 chapters. Over time the agreements between chapters and WMF became more formalized.
Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) is the oldest chapter, holding its first meeting in 2004. As of 2016, it had a budget of €20 million. Some chapters such as WMDE get some of their funds directly from grants and supporting memberships. Some others get their funds primarily from annual plan grants from WMF. As of 2019, roughly 10% of the WMF budget is distributed in this way to chapters and thematic organizations.
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is an American non-profit and charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It owns the domain name
A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
s and maintains most of the movement's websites.
WMF was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales so that there would be an independent charitable entity responsible for the domains and trademarks, and so that Wikipedia and its sister projects could be funded through non-profit means in the future. Its purpose was "... to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
According to WMF's 2015 financial statements, in 2015 WMF had a budget of US$72 million, spending US$52 million on its operation, and increasing its reserves to US$82 million. WMF is primarily funded by donations with the average donation being $15.
Wikimedia user groups
There are over 800 language editions of different Wikimedia projects, each with groups of editors working on areas of shared interest. Some have Wikiprojects with their own project pages, membership lists, and open task trackers. Some also register as community user groups to participate in movement governance, use community logos outside of the wikis, and receive grants for events and projects. , there are over 130 user groups.
References
External links
* /www.wikimedia.org Wikimedia home page* Wikimedia movement structure description @ Meta-Wiki
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
{{Wikipedia
Social movements
Wiki communities
Wikimedia Foundation