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, 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.
The Wikipedia community is the community of contributors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It consists of editors (Wikipedians), 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. They can be volunteer or salaried, part- or full-time.
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 [12] and charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It owns the domain names 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." [13] [14] [15]
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. [16] WMF is primarily funded by donations with the average donation being $15. [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 10 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.
MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software.
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. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. It is best known as the host platform for Wikipedia, the largest crowdsourced online encyclopedia and the 7th most visited website in the world, but also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.
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 that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry.
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.
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.
A Wikipedian in residence or Wikimedian in residence (WiR) is a Wikipedia editor, a Wikipedian, who accepts a placement with an institution, typically an art gallery, library, archive, museum, cultural institution, learned society, or institute of higher education to facilitate Wikipedia entries related to that institution's mission, encourage and assist it to release material under open licenses, and to develop the relationship between the host institution and the Wikimedia community. A Wikipedian in residence generally helps to coordinate Wikipedia-related outreach events between the GLAM and the general public such as editathons.
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".
The Wiki Education Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. It runs the Wikipedia Education 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 returning to proprietary search engines. Its goal was to protect user privacy, to be open and transparent about how a piece of information originates, and to allow access to related metadata.
WikiConference North America, formerly WikiConference USA, is an annual conference organized by the Wikipedia community in North America.
Felix Nartey is a Ghanaian social entrepreneur and open advocate. He was named the Wikimedian of the Year in August 2017 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales at Wikimania. He is a 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.