Wikimedia movement

The Wikimedia movement is the global movement of contributors to Wikimedia projects, originally created around Wikipedia and expanded to many other projects. It includes the Wikipedia community with around 70,000 volunteers,[1] volunteers for other Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, volunteer software developers contributing to MediaWiki, and others. A number of organisations incorporated in many countries support these volunteers, including the main Wikimedia Foundation, chapters, thematic organisations, and user groups.

Community

The Wikipedia community is the community of contributors to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Projects

Main article: Wikimedia project

Wikimedia projects include Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia, Wiktionary, a dictionary, Wikibooks, educational textbooks, Wikinews, news articles, Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, Wikisource, a library of source documents, Wikiversity, educational material, Wikivoyage, a travel guide, and Wikimedia Commons, a data repository of media like images, video, data.

Organisations

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

Wikimedia Foundation

Main article: Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is an American non-profit and charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It owns the internet domain names and operates most of the movements websites, like Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, as well as Wikimedia Commons. 2015 it had a budget of 72 Mio USD, spending 52 Mio USD on its operation, and increasing its reserves to 82Mio USD with the rest.[2]

The WMF was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a way to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects through non-profit means. Its purpose is "... 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."[3][4][5]

Chapters

Chapters are organizations to support Wikimedia projects in a specified geographical region, mostly a country. There are 41 chapters currently, Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) the biggest amongst them, with a total budget of 20Mio EUR, approximately 1 Mio is used for the corporation responsible to distribute the donations, 4Mio are transferred to the WMF.[6][7] To have the same procedure, every chapter follows the same process and requests its yearly budget at the funds dissemination committee. The foundation as internet domain owner of the project pages requests a share of the donations via the website in a country (e.g. for Germany, Switzerland), or pays a chapter the agreed amount (other chapters). A total of under 4 Mio USD is distributed via this way to chapters and thematic organisations.[8] The legal base is a "Chapters Agreement" with the foundation.[9]

Thematic organisations

Thematic organisations are founded to support Wikimedia projects in a focal area. Currently one such organisation exists.[8][10]

User groups

User groups have less formal requirements than chapters and thematic organisations. They support and promote the Wikimedia projects locally or on a specific theme, topic, subject, or issue. Beginning of 2016 55 user groups exist [11] Once they are recognized by the Affiliations Committee, they enter into a "User Groups Agreement and Code of Conduct" with the foundation.[12]

References

  1. ↑ http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/, statistics, accessed 2016-04-20.
  2. ↑ WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION, INC. Financial Statements, June 30, 2015 and 2014,
  3. ↑ Jimmy Wales (June 20, 2003). "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation". mail:wikipedia-l. Retrieved November 26, 2012.
  4. ↑ Neate, Rupert (October 7, 2008). "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales goes bananas". The Daily Telegraph. 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.
  5. ↑ WMF Bylaws, Article II, Statement of Purpose, accessed 2016-04-20.
  6. ↑ Chapters, accessed 2016-04-20.
  7. ↑ Jahresplan WMDE 2016, accessed 2016-04-20.
  8. 1 2 annual plan grants, accessed 2016-04-20
  9. ↑ chapters creation guide
  10. ↑ What are Wikimedia thematic organizations?, accessed 2016-04-20.
  11. ↑ Wikimedia User Groups
  12. ↑ Wikimedia User groups creation guide
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