Misplaced Pages

Wikimedia Foundation

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The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent organization of Misplaced Pages, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Nupedia. It is a non-profit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, USA. Its existence was officially announced by Bomis CEO and Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimbo Wales on June 20, 2003. The name "Wikimedia" was coined by Sheldon Rampton in a WikiEN-l mailing list post and the domain name http://wikimedia.org was secured for the then future Foundation by fellow Misplaced Pages contributor Daniel Mayer.

The goals of the foundation are to encourage the growth and development of open content, WikiWiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge and without advertising. In addition to managing the already developed multilingual general encyclopedia and almanac named Misplaced Pages, there is a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary and a quote encylopedia with public domain speeches named Wikiquote. There are plans to start a project to write open-content textbooks (despite some point of view issues). The Foundation also manages the operations of the largely dormant Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content).

With the Foundation's announcement, Wales also transferred ownership of all Misplaced Pages, Wiktionary and Nupedia domain names to Wikimedia along with the copyrights for all materials related to these projects that were created by Bomis employees or Wales himself. The computer equipment used to run all the Wikimedia projects is still the property of Bomis but Wales mentioned the possibility of transferring these assets to the Foundation in the near future.

Wales previously mentioned on several occasions that bandwidth and power will continue to be provided by Bomis free of charge for these projects. It is hoped that the existence of the non-profit foundation will make it possible to generate enough revenue through donations and grants to ensure the continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects.

There had already been extensive discussions of the responsibilities of a board, and attempts to start to write a board manual. More egalitarian methods of governance had also been explored. It is not clear how these will influence the new Wikimedia process.

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