Press kit/Wikimania 2007/Wikimedia Foundation overview

The Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent organization of numerous open-source content projects, including the popular website Wikipedia. Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to empower ever single human being with the ability to share in the sum of all human knowledge. This is accomplished by encouraging the growth, development, and distribution of free, multilingual content, which is organized and gathered through diverse wikis.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an avid champion of the Free Culture movement, and believes that educational tools should be free and available to everyone. As a result, the Foundation supports many programs and organizations "that align themselves with the philosophies of the Free Culture movement. The primary role of the Foundation, however, is to provide projects with technical and administrative support. Since each project is self-governing, the Foundation does not involve itself with the day to day editorial tasks, nor management of any one particular project.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s assets include the servers, domain names and trademarks of the numerous Wikimedia projects, and the MediaWiki software. Additionally, since the Foundation is a nonprofit, it relies entirely on public donations and grants, and operates mostly with volunteer staff.

The Wiki Technology

The key to our projects is the innovative and relatively new type of technology, known as Wiki. Invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, a wiki allows users to make edits to a website using a web browser. The name is derived from the Hawaiian word “wiki”, meaning quick. The Wiki technology has become an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring, thanks to the ease of interaction and operation.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a pioneer in the use of the Wiki technology. The Foundation’s experience in using and developing this new technology, has helped several organizations that are now beginning to implement their own wikis. The Wiki software used by the Wikimedia projects is called MediaWiki.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia, and adapted by other Wikimedia Foundation projects. The software is developed entirely by a dedicated core of techie volunteers and is published under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In addition to the Wikimedia projects, MediaWiki has been deployed as a collaborative knowledge management tool by international cooperation's, organizations, and universities. MediaWiki is free server-based software, designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scaleable software, and a feature-rich wiki implementation that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database. Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily. When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software. For more information or to download the software, please visit www.mediawiki.org

The Wikimedia Server Farm

The Wikimedia projects run on a cluster of around 250 Linux servers located in Florida, Amsterdam, and Seoul. During peak times, the servers handle 27,000 requests per second, the average is 33,000 req/s. In June 2006, the sites had 128 million unique visitors. (Source:ComScore)

Board of Trustees

The Wikimedia Foundation’s policies are set by the Board of Trustee, according the Foundation’s charter.

Three members are elected from the Wikimedian community, who are found in all corners of the world. Elections are advertised throughout the projects, and members of the Wikimedia community can vote for as many candidates as they see fit. Terms are two years long.

Frieda Brioschi

Ms. Brioschi joined the Wikimedia Board in July 2007. She has been involved in Wikipedia and other WMF projects since May 2003. In June 2005 she helped found Wikimedia Italia, a local chapter organization associated with Wikimedia, and has been president of that organization since. She currently lives in Rome where she works as a programmer.

Michael Davis

Mr Davis is a graduate of the Williams College and the University of Chicago. Formerly the Ceo of Chicago Options Associates, Michale is the Chief Operating Offi cer of community-focused wiki hosting service, Wikia, Inc. He lives in St. Petersburg, FL.

Jan-Bart de Vreede

Mr De Vreede has worked for the Kennisnet Foundation promoting wiki software and the Wikimedia projects. He has been involved with Wikimedia since 2004, and was a speaker at Wikimania 2005 and 2006. He has studied Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management.

Erik Möller

Mr Möller has been an active editor of Wikipedia since 2001 and has also contributed to the underlying software, MediaWiki. Möller is a freelance journalist and author, and is a staunch supporter of the Free Content, Free Software, and balanced intellectual monopoly rights legislation.

Florence Nibart-Devouard

Currently, Ms Nibart-Devouard is the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation. Hailing from France, she is an engineer in Agronomy (ENSAIA), and holds a DEA in Genetics and biotechnologies. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in 2002 and is known under the pseudonym “Anthere.”

Jimbo Wales

Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales is the founder of Wikipedia. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, he is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama, and worked as a Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a future and options trading firm in Chicago. Currently, Mr. Wales is the founder of his for-profit company, Wikia.

Kat Walsh

Ms Walsh is currently studying technology and intellectual property law at George Mason University School of Law. She is a member of Wikimedia’s Communication Committee and has served on the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. Walsh is a classical bassoonists, and holds a B.A. in music from Stetson University.