Type | Informal organization of individual contributors, chapters, user groups and thematic organizations |
---|---|
Focus | Free, open-content, wiki-based Internet projects |
Area served | Worldwide |
Services |
|
Website | wikimedia |
The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. [1] [2] This community directly builds and administers these projects [3] with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software. [4]
First created around and by Wikipedia's community of volunteer editors (Wikipedians), it has since expanded to other projects like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata and volunteer software engineers and developers contributing to the software used to power Wikimedia, MediaWiki.
As of 2023, [update] Wikimedia's content projects include:
Other supporting projects in the Wikimedia movement include:
The Wikimedia community includes a number of communities devoted to single wikis:
A multilingual cross-project community developed on the Meta-Wiki (meta.wikimedia.org) where translation and governance discussions happen.
The Wikipedia community, known as Wikipedians, is the community of contributors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It consists of editors, some operating Wikipedia bots, and administrators. The Arbitration Committee (or ArbCom) is a court of last resort for disputes on Wikipedia. [5]
Wikipedians in residence are Wikipedians and Wikimedians who collaborate with a cultural institution to help integrate its work into the projects.
Thematic organizations are charities, similar to chapters, founded to support Wikimedia projects in a subject focal area. As of 2021 [update] there are two such organizations. [6] [7] [8]
National and regional community groups have incorporated chapters, charitable organizations that support Wikimedia projects and their participants in specified countries and geographical regions. As of 2021 [update] there are 39 chapters. [9] Over time the agreements between chapters and WMF became more formalized. [10]
Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) is the oldest chapter, holding its first meeting in 2004. As of 2016, it had a budget of €20 million. [9] [11] 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. [6]
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is an American non-profit and charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco. It owns the domain names and maintains most of the movement's websites. [12] 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. [13] WMF is primarily funded by donations with the average donation being $15. [14]
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." [15] [16] [17]
There are over 800 language editions of different Wikimedia projects, each with groups of editors working on areas of shared interest. Some have Wikiprojects [18] 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. As of 2023 [update] , there are over 140 user groups. [19]
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
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 ; multiple Wikisources make up the overall project of Wikisource. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
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 been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".
Wikimedia UK (WMUK), also known as Wikimedia United Kingdom, is a registered charity established to support volunteers in the United Kingdom who work on Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. As such, it is a Wikimedia chapter approved by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which owns and hosts those projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. It also hosts fourteen similar projects and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all. The Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund his crowdsourced wiki projects. They had previously been hosted by Bomis, Wales's for-profit company.
Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a wiki-based media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, free knowledge and free content, and social and technical aspects related to these topics.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sanskrit Wikipedia is the Sanskrit edition of Wikipedia, a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its five thousand articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, with major concentration of contributors in India and Nepal.
The Odia Wikipedia is the Odia edition of Wikipedia. It is a free, web-based, collaborative encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. The project was started by Suneet Samaetha in June 2002 and reached 1,000 articles in May 2011. This is one of the first four Indic Wikipedias started in 2002, among over 20 Indic language Wikipedias. The first edit on Odia Wikipedia occurred on 3 June 2002.
WikiConference India is a national Wikipedia conference organised in India. The first WikiConference India conference was held in November 2011, in Mumbai, the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It was organised by the Mumbai Wikipedia community in partnership with Wikimedia India Chapter with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation. The conference is positioned as the annual national flagship event for Wikimedia in India and is open to participation from citizens of all nations. The focus is on matters concerning India on Wikipedia projects and other sister projects in English and other Indian folk languages. WikiConference India 2023 took place in Hyderabad from 28 to 30 April 2023.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Wikimedia Deutschland is a German non-profit association based in Berlin. It was founded in 2004 and recognized that year as the first national chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds and supports Wikipedia and other projects.
VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.
The Wiki Education Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. It runs the Wikipedia Student Program, which promotes the integration of Wikipedia into coursework by educators in Canada and the United States.
Knowledge Engine (KE) was a search engine project initiated in 2015 by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to locate and display verifiable and trustworthy information from public-information sources in a way that was less reliant on traditional search engines. It aimed to allow readers to stay on Wikipedia.org and other Wikipedia-related projects when looking for additional information rather than turning to proprietary search engines. Its goal was to protect user privacy, to be open and transparent about how its information originates, and to allow access to related metadata.
Felix Nartey is a Ghanaian social entrepreneur and advocate. He was named the Wikimedian of the Year in 2017 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales at Wikimania. He is co-founder of Open Foundation West Africa and Creative Commons Ghana, where he is also the chapter lead.
The Wikimedia movement has always been a movement of writers (and curators) rather than readers.
The encyclopedia's huge fan base became such a drain on Bomis's resources that Mr. Wales, and co-founder Larry Sanger, thought of a radical new funding model – charity.