A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. It entails more than basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death), a biography also portrays a subject's experience of these events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of a subject's personality.

Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Biographical works in diverse media—from literature to film—form the genre known as a biography.

An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and, at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs. An autobiography is about a life of a subject, written by that subject or sometimes with a collaborator. ^[1]

Early biography[link]

The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of the classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of the early history in Europe were those of the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks, and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to the church fathers, martyrs, popes, and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to the people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity (see Hagiography). One significant secular example of a biography from this period is the life of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard.

Meanwhile in the medieval Islamic civilization (c. AD 750 to 1258), biographies began to be produced on a large scale, noteably with the advent of paper and the beginning of the Prophetic biography tradition. This led to the introduction of a new literary genre: the biographical dictionary. The first biographical dictionaries were written in the Muslim world from the 9th century onwards. They contained more social data for a large segment of the population than that found in any other pre-industrial society. The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the prophets of Islam and their companions, with one of these early examples being The Book of The Major Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi. And then began the documentation of the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world.^[2]

By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as biographies of kings, knights, and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of such biographies was Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects, such as artists and poets and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was the landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "bestseller". Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the 15th century and the gradual increase in literacy. Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was essentially the first dictionary of the biography in Europe, followed by Thomas Fuller's The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life. Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates, A General History of the Pyrates (1724) is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates.^[3]

The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781–88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by the Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers, where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.

Generally the American biography followed the English model, while incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that a biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in the early American biography, the American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography, which sought to shape the individual character of a reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)

The distinction between the mass biography and the literary biography had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century, and reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower, thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing a sequence of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.

Much of the late nineteenth-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the nineteenth-century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography. Beginning with Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), the chronicle of self-defined failure that ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)

The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant, and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly these psychological ideas were changing the way Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. (Casper, 1999)

The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, Gamaliel Bradford, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig, among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism", in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism.

By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published, despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats via public libraries.

The late feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun observed that women's biographies and autobiographies began to change character during the second wave of feminist activism. She cited Nancy Milford's 1970 biography Zelda, as the "beginning of a new period of women's biography, because "[only] in 1970 were we ready to read not that Zelda had destroyed Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald her: he had usurped her narrative." Heilbrun named 1973 as the turning point in women's autobiography, with the publication of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, for that was the first instance where a woman told her life story, not as finding "beauty even in pain" and transforming "rage into spiritual acceptance," but acknowledging what had previously been forbidden to women: their pain, their rage, and their "open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life."^[4]

Multimedia forms[link]

With technological advances in the twentieth century, multimedia biography became more popular than literary forms of personality. Along with documentary Biographical films, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel, and History International.

More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies have appeared. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological narrative: instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways. (Manovich 220) Twenty-first century web 2.0 applications, such as Annoknips.com enable users all over the world to compile their own biography and illustrate it with other people's photos.

Book awards[link]

Several countries offer an annual prize for writing a biography such as the:

• Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize – Canada
• National Biography Award – Australia
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography – United States
• Whitbread Prize for Best Biography – United Kingdom
• J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography – United Kingdom
• Prix Goncourt de la Biographie – France

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	History portal

• Autobiography
• Biography: A Brief History (book)
• Biography in literature
• Dictionary of National Biography (DNB, notable figures from British history)
• Family history
• Historical document
• List of biographers
• List of political career biographies
• Lists of people
• Who's Who

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Casper, Scott E. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
• Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
• Lee, Hermione. Biography: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-953354-1
• Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
• Stone, Albert E. Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

External links[link]

Find more about Biography on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation
Type	501(c)(3) charitable organization
Founded	St. Petersburg, Florida, United States June 20, 2003 (2003-06-20)
Location	San Francisco, California, United States / Los Angeles, California (registered Agent)
Key people	Ting Chen, Chair of the Board Jimmy Wales, Chairman Emeritus[1] Sue Gardner, Executive Director
Area served	Worldwide
Focus	Free, open content, wiki-based internet projects
Method	Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Incubator and Meta-Wiki
Revenue	US$10,632,254 (July – December 2009)[2] (From donations)
Volunteers	350,000 (2005)[3]
Employees	75 (as of July 2011)[4]
Website	wikimediafoundation.org

Inside Wikimedia video

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. It is organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Incubator, Meta-Wiki and owns the now-defunct Nupedia. Its flagship project, Wikipedia, ranks in the top-ten most-visited websites worldwide.^[5] The creation of the foundation was officially announced on June 20, 2003, by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales,^[6] who had been operating Wikipedia under the aegis of his company Bomis.^[7]

Goal[link]

The Wikimedia Foundation falls under section 501(c)(3) of the US Internal Revenue Code as a public charity. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code is C60 (Adult, Continuing Education).^[8][9]The foundation's by-laws declare a statement of purpose of collecting and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally.^[10]

The Wikimedia Foundation's stated goal is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.^[11] This is possible thanks to its Terms of Use (updated and approved on June 2009, to adopt CC-BY-SA license).

History and growth[link]

File:WMF StrategicPlan2011 spreads.pdf

Jimmy Wales, Founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, in December 2008

File:Beyondencyclopediawikimania2010-100714133959-phpapp02.pdf

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003.^[12] It applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia on September 17, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004, and in the European Union on January 20, 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet."^{[citation needed]} There are plans to license the use of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.^[13]

The name "Wikimedia" was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English mailing list in March 2003.^[14]

With the foundation's announcement, Wales also transferred ownership of all Wikipedia, 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 was also donated by Wales to the foundation, which also acquired the domain names "wikimedia.org" and "wikimediafoundation.org".

In April 2005, the US Internal Revenue Service approved the foundation as an educational foundation in the category "Adult, Continuing Education", meaning all contributions to the foundation are tax-deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes.

On December 11, 2006, the foundation's board noted that the corporation could not become the membership organization initially planned but never implemented due to an inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida Statute. Accordingly, the bylaws were amended to remove all reference to membership rights and activities. The decision to change the bylaws was passed by the board unanimously.^[15]

On September 25, 2007, the foundation's board gave notice that the operations would be moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Major considerations cited for choosing San Francisco were proximity to like-minded organizations and potential partners as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel than is available from St. Petersburg, Florida.^[16][17][18]

The one billionth edit to a Wikimedia project took place on April 16, 2010.^[19]

Original Board of Trustees[link]

• In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed his business partners Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis to the foundation's board. In June 2004, an election was held for two user representative board members. Following one month of campaigning and two weeks of online voting, Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to join the board. In late 2004, Wales and Beesley launched a startup company, Wikia, affiliated with neither Wikimedia nor Bomis, except for their presence as principals/trustees. In July 2005, Beesley and Nibart-Devouard were re-elected to the board.

• On July 1, 2006, Beesley resigned from the board effective upon election of her successor, expressing concern about "certain events and tendencies that have arisen within the organization since the start of this year," but stating her intent to continue to participate in the Wikimedia projects, and in the formation of an Australian chapter. A special election was held in September to finish Beesley's term, ending with the mid-2007 election. The election was won by Erik Möller.

• In October 2006, Nibart-Devouard replaced Wales as chair of the Foundation. On December 8, 2006, the board expanded to seven people with the appointments of Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen. Effective December 15, 2006, Jan-Bart de Vreede was appointed to replace Shell.

• In the June 2007 election, Möller and Walsh were reelected; van Dillen, who ran for re-election, was narrowly defeated by Frieda Brioschi.

• Davis left the board in November 2007. Nibart-Devouard's elected term expires in June 2008. The appointed terms for Wales and de Vreede expired in December 2008. Brioschi's and Walsh's elected terms expired in June 2009.

• In December 2007, Möller resigned from the Board of Trustees, and was hired as the foundation's deputy director by the executive director.

• In February 2008, Florence Devouard announced the addition of two new board members: Michael Snow, an American lawyer and chair of the Communication Committee; and Domas Mituzas, a Lithuanian computer software engineer, MySQL employee, and longtime member of the core tech team.^[20]

• In April 2008, the board announced a restructuring of its membership, increasing the number of board positions to 10 overall, as follows:
  • Three community-elected seats
  • Two seats to be selected by the chapters
  • One board-appointed 'community founder' seat, to be occupied by Jimmy Wales
  • Four board-appointed 'specific expertise' seats^[21]

• In the June 2008 board election, Ting Chen was elected for a one-year term, then in September Frieda Brioschi resigned to be elected at the board of Wikimedia Italia.

• In the August 2009 board election, Ting Chen was re-elected, while Kat Walsh and Samuel Klein were elected, effective until July 2011.

• In the July 2010 board election, Michael Snow was replaced as chair of the board, although he retains his place on the Advisory Board.

• In the June 2011 board election, Ting Chen, Kat Walsh and Samuel Klein were re-elected.

Volunteer committees and positions[link]

In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study questioning users about the editing mechanism.^[22]

In 2004, the foundation appointed Tim Starling as developer liaison to help improve the MediaWiki software, Daniel Mayer as chief financial officer (finance, budgeting and coordination of fund drives), and Erik Möller as content partnership coordinator.

In May 2005, the foundation announced the appointment of seven people to official positions:^[23]

• Brion Vibber as chief technical officer (Vibber was also an employee of the Foundation, with other duties)
• Domas Mituzas as hardware officer
• Jens Frank as developer liaison
• Möller as chief research officer
• Danny Wool as grants coordinator
• Elisabeth Bauer as press officer
• Jean-Baptiste Soufron as lead legal coordinator

In January 2006, the foundation created several committees, including the Communication Committee, in an attempt to further organize activities essentially handled by volunteers at that time.^[24] Starling resigned that month to spend more time on his PhD program.

Employees[link]

The Summer of Research 2011 team working at Wikimedia Foundation's San Francisco headquarters

The foundation's functions were, for the first few years, executed almost entirely by volunteers. In 2005, it had only two employees, Danny Wool, a coordinator, and Brion Vibber, a software manager. Though the number of employees has grown, the foundation's staff is still very small, and the bulk of foundation work continues to be done by volunteers.

As of October 4, 2006, the foundation had five paid employees:^[25] two programmers, an administrative assistant, a coordinator handling fundraising and grants, and an interim executive director,^[26] Brad Patrick, previously the foundation's general counsel. Patrick ceased his activity as interim director in January 2007, and then resigned from his position as legal counsel, effective April 1, 2007. He was replaced by Mike Godwin, who served as general counsel and legal coordinator from July 2007^[27] until 2010.

In January 2007, Carolyn Doran was named chief operating officer and Sandy Ordonez joined as head of communications.^[28] Doran began working as a part-time bookkeeper in 2006 after being sent by a temporary agency. Doran later left the foundation in July 2007, and Sue Gardner was hired as consultant and special advisor (later CEO). Some months after Doran's departure, it was determined^[29] that Doran was a convicted felon, with a DUI arrest during her tenure at the foundation and a substantial criminal history, including shooting her boyfriend and complicity in credit card forgery.^[30] Her departure from the organization was cited as one of the reasons the foundation took about seven months to release its fiscal 2007 financial audit.^[31]

Danny Wool, officially the grant coordinator but also largely involved in fundraising and business development, resigned in March 2007. In February 2007, the foundation added a new position, chapters coordinator, and hired Delphine Ménard,^[32] who had been occupying the position as a volunteer since August 2005. Cary Bass was hired in March 2007 in the position of volunteer coordinator. In May 2007, Vishal Patel was hired to assist in business development.^[33] Oleta McHenry was brought in as accountant in May 2007, through a temporary placement agency and made the official fulltime accountant in August 2007. In January 2008, the foundation appointed three new staff: Veronique Kessler as the new chief financial and operating officer, Kul Wadhwa to replace Vishal Patel as head of business development, and Jay Walsh as head of communications.

In June 2008, the foundation announced two staff additions in fundraising: Rebecca Handler as major gifts officer and Rand Montoya as head of community giving.^[34] Soon afterward, Sara Crouse was hired as head of partnerships and foundation relations.^[35] In fall 2008, the foundation hired three software developers: Tomasz Finc, Ariel Glenn, and Trevor Parscal.^[36]

In May 2011, the foundation had 65 employees. A list of Wikimedia Foundation staff can be found at the Wikimedia Foundation's staff page.

Boards[link]

Board of Trustees[link]

Board members at Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires

These are the members of the Board of Trustees and the expiry of their terms, as of October 2011^[update]:^[37]

• Ting Chen, chair (July 2013)
• Jan-Bart de Vreede, vice-chair (December 2012)
• Phoebe Ayers, executive secretary (July 2012, appointed by Wikimedia Chapters^[38])
• Stu West, treasurer (December 2012)
• Bishakha Datta (December 2012)
• Matt Halprin (December 2012)
• Samuel Klein (July 2013)
• Arne Klempert (July 2012, appointed by Wikimedia Chapters^[37])
• Jimmy Wales (December 2012)
• Kat Walsh (July 2013)

Advisory board[link]

The Advisory Board is an international network of experts who have agreed to give the foundation meaningful help on a regular basis in many different areas, including law, organizational development, technology, policy, and outreach.^[39] As of August 2010^[update], the members are:

Projects, initiatives and chapters[link]

Projects[link]

The Wikimedia projects logo family

In addition to the multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, the foundation manages a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote, a repository of source texts in any language named Wikisource, a collection of e-book texts for students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks, and a collection of educational materials and activities named Wikiversity. Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children.

The launch dates shown below are when official domains were established for the projects and/or beta versions were launched; preliminary test versions at other domains are not considered.

Wikimania[link]

This section requires expansion.

Each year, Wikimedia organizes the event Wikimania, a conference for users of the Wikimedia Foundation projects. It was first organized in Frankfurt (Germany), 2005.

Local chapters[link]

(dark blue) are existing chapters. (dark turquoise) indicates a chapter has been board approved but not yet founded. (green) indicates a chapter is in the planning stages. (light blue) indicates a chapter in discussion.

Wikimedia projects have an international scope. To continue this success on an organizational level, Wikimedia is building an international network of associated organizations.

Local chapters are self-dependent organizations, coordinated by a Chapters Committee (ChapCom), that share the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation and support them within a specified geographical region, usually based on physical boundaries. They support the foundation, the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia projects in different ways—by collecting donations, organizing local events and projects and spreading the word of Wikimedia, free content and Wiki culture. They also provide the community and potential partners with a point of contact capable of fulfilling specific local needs.

Local chapters are self-dependent associations with no legal control of nor responsibility for the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation and vice versa.

Area	Title	URL	Since
Argentina	Wikimedia Argentina	wikimedia.org.ar	02007-09-01September 1, 2007
Australia	Wikimedia Australia	wikimedia.org.au	02008-03-01March 1, 2008
Austria	Wikimedia Österreich	wikimedia.at	02008-02-26February 26, 2008
Bangladesh	Wikimedia Bangladesh	bd.wikimedia.org	02011-10-03October 3, 2011
Canada	Wikimedia Canada	wikimedia.ca	02011-05-24May 24, 2011
Chile	Wikimedia Chile	wikimedia.cl	02011-07-16July 16, 2011
Czech Republic	Wikimedia Česká republika	wikimedia.cz	02008-03-06March 6, 2008
Denmark	Wikimedia Danmark	wikimedia.dk	02009-07-03July 3, 2009
Estonia	Wikimedia Eesti	et.wikimedia.org	02010-08-31August 31, 2010
Finland	Wikimedia Suomi	fi.wikimedia.org	02009-09-21September 21, 2009
France	Wikimédia France	wikimedia.fr	02004-10-23October 23, 2004
Germany	Wikimedia Deutschland	wikimedia.de	02004-06-13June 13, 2004
Hong Kong	香港維基媒體協會	wikimedia.hk	02008-03-01March 1, 2008
Hungary	Wikimédia Magyarország	wikimedia.hu	02008-09-27September 27, 2008
India	Wikimedia India	wikimedia.in	02011-01-03January 3, 2011
Indonesia	Wikimedia Indonesia	wikimedia.or.id	02008-10-07October 7, 2008
Israel	Wikimedia Israel	wikimedia.org.il	02007-06-26June 26, 2007
Italy	Wikimedia Italia	wikimedia.it	02005-06-17June 17, 2005
Macau	澳門維基媒體協會	wikimedia.org.mo	02011-04-24April 24, 2011
Macedonia	Викимедија Македонија	mk.wikimedia.org	02009-09-21September 21, 2009
Mexico	Wikimedia México	mx.wikimedia.org	02011-08-03August 3, 2011
Netherlands	Wikimedia Nederland	nl.wikimedia.org	02006-03-27March 27, 2006
Norway	Wikimedia Norge	no.wikimedia.org	02007-06-23June 23, 2007
Philippines	Wikimedia Philippines	wikimedia.org.ph	02010-04-12April 12, 2010
Poland	Wikimedia Polska	pl.wikimedia.org	02005-11-18November 18, 2005
Portugal	Wikimedia Portugal	wikimedia.pt	02009-07-03July 3, 2009
Russia	Викимедиа РУ	wikimedia.ru	02008-05-24May 24, 2008
Serbia	Wikimedia Serbia	rs.wikimedia.org	02005-12-03December 3, 2005
South Africa	Wikimedia South Africa		02012-02-27February 27, 2012
Spain	Wikimedia España	wikimedia.org.es	02011-02-07February 7, 2011
Sweden	Wikimedia Sverige	se.wikimedia.org	02007-12-11December 11, 2007
Switzerland	Wikimedia CH	wikimedia.ch	02006-05-14May 14, 2006
Taiwan	中華民國維基媒體協會	wikimedia.tw	02007-07-04July 4, 2007
Ukraine	Вікімедіа Україна	wikimedia.org.ua	02009-07-03July 3, 2009
United Kingdom	Wikimedia UK	uk.wikimedia.org	02009-01-12January 12, 2009
Venezuela	Wikimedia Venezuela	wikimedia.org.ve	02011-10-04October 4, 2011
New York City	Wikimedia New York City	nyc.wikimedia.org	02009-01-12January 12, 2009
Washington, D.C.	Wikimedia District of Columbia	wikimediadc.org	02011-09-12September 12, 2011

Strategic Plan[link]

Video explaining the Wikimedia Strategic Plan

In response to the growing size and popularity of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a Strategic Plan to improving and sustaining the Wikimedia movement. The plan was announced in July 2009, followed by a process of interviews and surveys with people from across the Wikimedia movement, including board of trustees, members of staff and volunteer editors.^[40] After wide consultation, the ongoing plan was intended to be the basis of a five-year plan to further outreach, improve content quality and quality control, and optimising operational areas such as finance and infrastructure.^[41]

Wikipedia Usability Initiative[link]

In December 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a restricted donation of $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation, to improve Wikipedia's accessibility.^[42] Later named the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, the grant enabled the Wikimedia Foundation to appoint project-specific staff to the technology department.^[43]

A series of surveys were conducted throughout 2009. This began with a Qualitative Environment Survey on MediaWiki extensions, followed by a Qualitative Statistical Survey focusing on volume of edits, number of new users, and related statistics. In March 2009, a Usability and Experience Study was carried out on new and non editors of the English Wikipedia. The aim was to discover what obstacles participants encountered while editing Wikipedia, ranging from small changes to more complicated syntax such as templates. The study recruited 2500 people for in-person laboratory testing via the Wikipedia website, which was filtered down to ten participants. The results were collated and used by the technology team to improve Wikipedia's usability.^[44] The Usability and Experience Study was followed up by the Usability, Experience and Progress Study in September 2009. This study recruited different new and non editors for in-person trials on a new Wikipedia skin.^[45]

The initiative ultimately culminated in a new Wikipedia skin named Vector, constructed based on the results of the usability studies. This was introduced by default in stages, beginning in May 2010.^[46]

Public Policy Initiative[link]

In May 2010, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the Public Policy Initiative, following a $1.2 million donation by the Stanton Foundation.^[47] The Public Policy Initiative was set up to improve articles relating to public policy-related issues in the United States. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated that "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal".^[47]

As part of the initiative, Wikipedia collaborated with ten universities to help students and professors create and maintain articles relating to public policy.^[48] Volunteer editors of Wikipedia, known as "ambassadors", provided assistance to students and professors. This was either done on campus sites or online.^[49]

Disputes and lawsuits[link]

This section requires expansion.

Many disputes have resulted in litigation^{[50][51][52][53]} while others have not.^[54] Attorney Matt Zimmerman stated, "Without strong liability protection, it would be difficult for Wikipedia to continue to provide a platform for user-created encyclopedia content."^[55]

In December 2011 the Foundation hired Washington, DC lobbyist Dow Lohnes Government Strategies LLC to lobby the United States Congress with regard to "Civil Rights/Civil Liberties" and "Copyright/Patent/Trademark."^[56] At the time of the hire the Foundation was concerned specifically about a bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act.^[57]

Finances[link]

Interview with Garfield Byrd, Chief of Finance and Administration at the Wikimedia Foundation. Recorded October 7, 2011

Increase in cash

The Wikimedia Foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.^[58] It is exempt from federal income tax^[58][59] and from state income tax.^[58][60] It is not a private foundation, and contributions to it qualify as tax-deductible charitable contributions.^[58] The continued technical and economic growth of each of the Wikimedia projects is dependent mostly on donations but the Wikimedia Foundation also increases its revenue by alternative means of funding such as grants, sponsorship, services and brand merchandising. The Wikimedia OAI-PMH update feed service, targeted primarily at search engines and similar bulk analysis and republishing, has been a source of revenue for several years,^[58] but is no longer open to new customers.^[61] DBpedia was given access to this feed free of charge.^[62]

Since the end of fiscal year ended 2004, the Foundation's net assets have grown from $57K ^[63] to $24.2M at the end of fiscal year ended June 30, 2011^[58]. During 2011, the Foundation received public contributions and grants support and revenue from services and brand merchandising totaling $27.5M, with concurrent expenses of $17.9M. The Foundation continued to expand and is in-line with its five-year strategic plan. Therefore, it is expected that revenue and expenses will continue to increase.

Charity Navigator gave Wikimedia three out of four possible stars for fiscal years 2008 and 2009, which improved to four-stars in 2010.^[64]

There are both supporting and opposing arguments regarding whether Wikimedia should switch to an advertising-based revenue model.^[65]

Grants[link]

In March 2008, the Foundation announced a large donation, at the time its largest donation yet: a three-year, $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.^[66]

In 2009, the Foundation received four grants – the first grant was a $890,000 Stanton Foundation grant which was aimed to help study and simplify user interface for first-time authors of Wikipedia.^[67] The second was a $300,000 Ford Foundation Grant, given in July 2009, for Wikimedia Commons that aimed to improve the interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading on Wikimedia websites.^[68] In August 2009, the Foundation received a $500,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.^[69] Lastly, in August 2009, the Omidyar Network issued a potential $2M in "grant" funding to Wikimedia.^[70]

In 2010, Google donated $2M to the Wikimedia Foundation.^[71]. Also in 2010, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation pledged a $800K grant and all was funded during 2011.

In March 2011, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation authorized another $3M grant to continue to develop and maintain the Foundation's mission. The grant is to be funded over three years with the first $1M funded in July 2011 and the remaining $2M is scheduled to be funded in August 2012 and 2013. In August 2011, the Stanton Foundation pledged to fund a $3.6M grant of which $1.8M was funded and the remaining is scheduled to be funded in September 2012. This is the largest grant received by the Wikimedia Foundation to-date ^[72]. Also in 2011, the Foundation received grants from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation^[73] and the Kaphan Foundation in the amounts of $500K and $100K, respectively.

In 2012, the Foundation was awarded a grant of $1.25M from Lisbet Rausing^[73]and Peter Baldwin through Charities Aid Foundation which is to be funded in five equal installments. The first installment of $250K was received in April 2012 and the remaining are to be funded in December 2012-2015.

Technology[link]

The foundation employs technology including hardware and software to run its projects.

Hardware[link]

Overview of system architecture, December 2010. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.

Wikimedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu),^[74][75] with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam.^[76] Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.^[77] Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers.^[78] Further statistics are available based on a publicly available 3-months Wikipedia access trace.^[79] Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses.

Software[link]

The operation of Wikimedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database.^[80] The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed^[81] to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension^[82][83] was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. Currently Lucene Search 2.1,^[84] which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3,^[85] is used.

See also[link]

A workers area at the Wikimedia Foundation's San Francisco headquarters

The location of the Wikimedia Foundation's San Francisco headquarters

	Florida portal
	San Francisco Bay Area portal
	Wikipedia portal

• Crowdsourcing
• Wikipedia

References[link]

External links[link]

Find more about Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• Official website
• Official blog
• Wikimedia on freenode, irc.freenode.net
• Wikimedia Foundation mailing list archives

Documents (reports, plans etc.)[link]

• Wikimedia Foundation 2010–11 Annual Plan (published on June 29, 2010)
• Wikimedia Foundation's financial report, wikimediafoundation.org
• The Wikimedia Foundation annual report, wikimediafoundation.org
• The Wikimedia Foundation bylawsPDF (259 KB), wikimediafoundation.org
• Financial statements 2004–2005–2006PDF (90.2 KB), upload.wikimedia.org

Other[link]

• Wikimedia-pedia, knowledge-base, strategy.wikimedia.org
• Public Record for Wikimedia Foundation Inc., Division of Corporations – Florida Department of State, sunbiz.org
• The Wikimedia Foundation profile at Charity Navigator, charitynavigator.org
• Sheldon Rampton's WikiEN-l post, mail.wikipedia.org
• en.Wikizine.org (An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community)
• Wikimedia Foundation on Twitter