Wikimedia movement

Last updated
Wikimedia movement
Type Informal organization of individual contributors, chapters, user groups and thematic organizations
FocusFree, open-content, wiki-based Internet projects
Area served
Worldwide
Services
Website wikimedia.org

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]

Contents

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.

Projects

Content projects

As of 2023, Wikimedia's content projects include:

  • Wikipedia – an online encyclopedia
  • Meta-Wiki – a Wikimedia wiki project idea discussion and coordination location
  • Wikibooks – a repository for educational textbooks
  • Wikidata – a shared repository of structured data, accessible by the other projects
  • Wikifunctions – 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 – a shared repository of free-to-use media like images, videos and sounds, accessible by the other projects
  • Wikinews – a repository for news articles
  • Wikiquote – a collection of quotations
  • Wikisource – a library of source texts and documents
  • Wikispecies – a taxonomic catalogue of species
  • Wikiversity – a repository of educational materials
  • Wikivoyage – a travel guide
  • Wiktionary – a dictionary

Infrastructure and interface projects

Other supporting projects in the Wikimedia movement include:

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 (meta.wikimedia.org) where translation and governance discussions happen.

Wikipedia community

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

Wikipedians in residence are Wikipedians and Wikimedians who collaborate with a cultural institution to help integrate its work into the projects.

Thematic organizations

Thematic organizations are charities, similar to chapters, founded to support Wikimedia projects in a subject focal area. As of 2021 there are two such organizations. [6] [7] [8]

Wikimedia chapters

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  Wikimedia chapters (blue)
  Wikimedia user groups with a geographic focus (green)

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 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]

Wikimedia Foundation

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]

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 [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, there are over 140 user groups. [19]

Related Research Articles

Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one for each language. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German Wikipedia</span> German-language edition of Wikipedia

The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikivoyage</span> Free travel guide that anyone can edit

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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia UK</span> UK charity and chapter of the Wikimedia movement

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

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 related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software which underpins them all. The Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund these wiki projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Commons</span> Online repository of free-use media

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimania</span> Annual conference of the Wikimedia movement

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikipedia community</span> Volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sanskrit Wikipedia</span> Sanskrit-language edition of Wikipedia

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WikiConference India</span> Wikipedia conference in India

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. Wikiconference India 2025 is in the planning phase.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Wikipedia</span> Overview and topical guide to the free online crowdsourced encyclopedia

The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Deutschland</span> Wikimedia chapter in Germany

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VisualEditor</span> Rich-text editor for MediaWiki wikis

VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edit-a-thon</span> Editing collaboration on a specific topic

An edit-a-thon is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typically include basic editing training for new editors and may be combined with a more general social meetup. The word is a portmanteau of "edit" and "marathon". An edit-a-thon can either be "in-person" or online or a blended version of both. If it is not in-person, it is usually called a "virtual edit-a-thon" or "online edit-a-thon".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki Education Foundation</span> Nonprofit organization

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge Engine (search engine)</span> Wikimedia search engine project (2015–2016)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WikiConference North America</span> Conference of Wikimedia community from North America

WikiConference North America, formerly WikiConference USA, is an annual conference organized by the Wikipedia community in North America. The first two events were held at New York Law School and Washington, D.C.'s National Archives Building in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The third conference, rebranded WikiConference North America, was held at San Diego's Central Library in 2016, with a pre-conference day at Balboa Park.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Felix Nartey</span> Ghanaian social entrepreneur and 2017 Wikipedian of the Year

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.

References

  1. ↑ Koerner, Jackie; Reagle, Joseph (October 13, 2020). Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution. MIT Press. p. 273. ISBN   9780262360609. The Wikimedia movement has always been a movement of writers (and curators) rather than readers.
  2. ↑ Maher, Katherine (2020-10-15), "22 Capstone: Making History, Building the Future Together", ::Wikipedia @ 20, PubPub, ISBN   978-0-262-53817-6, archived from the original on 2021-10-16, retrieved 2021-09-06
  3. ↑ Kosseff, Jeff (April 15, 2019). The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. Cornell University Press. ISBN   9781501735790. Archived from the original on April 29, 2023. Retrieved March 20, 2023.
  4. ↑ Proffitt, Merrilee (April 2, 2018). Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge. American Library Association. p. 13. ISBN   9780838916322.
  5. ↑ Cohen, Noam (June 7, 2009). "The Wars of Words on Wikipedia's Outskirts" . The New York Times . Archived from the original on March 28, 2014. Retrieved June 9, 2009.
  6. 1 2 "Template:APG navigation". Meta-Wiki. Archived from the original on 2016-08-07. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
  7. ↑ "Wikimedia movement affiliates/Frequently asked questions". Meta-Wiki. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
  8. ↑ "Wikimedia thematic organizations". Meta-Wiki. Archived from the original on 2020-08-13. Retrieved 2021-08-25.
  9. 1 2 "Wikimedia chapters". Meta-Wiki. Archived from the original on 2016-09-17. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
  10. ↑ "Wikimedia chapters/Creation guide – Meta". Meta.wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 2016-11-30. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
  11. ↑ "Jahresplan 2016 – Wikimedia Deutschland". Wikimedia.de (in German). 2015-11-28. Archived from the original on 2019-07-05. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
  12. ↑ "GuideStar – WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION, INC". Archived from the original on 2021-01-21. Retrieved 2020-02-11.
  13. ↑ "WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION, INC. Financial Statements, June 30, 2015 and 2014" (PDF). Upload.wikimedia.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 12, 2016. Retrieved April 20, 2016.
  14. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions". WikiMedia Foundation. Archived from the original on 22 November 2013. Retrieved 23 September 2017.
  15. ↑ Jimmy Wales (June 20, 2003). "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation". mail:wikipedia-l. Archived from the original on March 30, 2013. Retrieved November 26, 2012.
  16. ↑ Neate, Rupert (October 7, 2008). "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales goes bananas". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on November 10, 2008. Retrieved October 25, 2009. 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.
  17. ↑ "Bylaws". Wikimedia Foundation. Archived from the original on 2017-02-25. Retrieved 2016-09-24.
  18. ↑ "WikiProjects – Meta". meta.wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 2021-08-14. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
  19. ↑ "Wikimedia user groups – Meta". Meta-Wiki. Archived from the original on April 13, 2023. Retrieved May 3, 2023.
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