Wikimedia Information Kit

“Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That‘s what we‘re doing.” The

Free content All of the articles in Wikimedia Foundation projects are “”; this means that they may be used for any purpose by anyone, including broadcasting or commercial uses.

Each contributor to the projects agrees to li- cense their contributions under one or more free licenses, such as the GNU Free Docu- mentation license or the The Wikimedia Foundation is a non profit Attribution license. These licenses are de- organisation which hosts several free- signed to allow reuse of the content by oth- content projects on the , such as ers, as well as modification of the material. , the award-winning multi-lingual They do have some restrictions, particularly . Other online projects include that any use of the material must also be li- , free, open-content textbooks; censed freely, and that the authors (or their , a free source; , a designated agent such as the Foundation it- free compendium of quotations; , self) are credited. This idea of sharing one’s a free library; , an open, free di- copyrighted creations, and using a license to rectory of species; and , a free insure future derivations are likewise shared, multilingual . is known as “”.

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. was chartered Using this free content , articles are to develop and maintain the necessary in- able to be modified rapidly and repeatedly frastructure for the growing online projects. by contributors to the projects, letting each The corporation, established in the state of author build on the material provided by in the , owns the serv- earlier editors. Articles tend to grow, with ers and other assets, and insures the organi- large sections splitting off to become their zation’s expenses are paid. Local chapters own related articles, but sometimes articles have been set up France, Germany, , the are pruned back to more basic facts if en- Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, and Switzer- thusiastic contributors get too detailed in land to support and promote the projects their prose. The ability to modify, expand, on a national level. The Wikimedia Founda- or delete information as necessary helps tion operates mostly with volunteer staff give Wikimedia Foundation projects their and relies entirely on public donations and dynamic nature. grants to meet its mission of providing free knowledge to every person in the world.

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 The Technology

Invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, are which any user can edit, quickly and easily, using a . The name is derived from the Hawaiian word “wiki”, meaning quick; Cunningham named the software after the “wiki wiki” (quicker quick) buses at the Honolulu airport. Wikis use a simple formatting language anyone can learn in just a few minutes. The simple formatting and ease of editing via the web results in very rapidly developing websites.

MediaWiki The used by the Wikimedia projects is called MediaWiki. MediaWiki is developed by volunteers and Wikimedia foundation employees with the goal of creating an encyclopedia, and is an open- source project published under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In addition to the Wikimedia projects, MediaWiki has The Wikimedia farm been deployed as a collaborative tool by international corpora- The Wikimedia projects run on a cluster of tions, organizations and universities as well around 250 servers located in Florida, as special interest groups of all kinds. and Seoul. During peak times the servers handle 17,500 requests per second, the average is 11,200 req/s. In June 2006 the sites had 128 million unique visitors (Source: ComScore).

Database server mirror File server Tool server Search server Apache Webserver Load Balancer Cache

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 The Wikimedia projects

Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org http://commons.wikimedia.org Wikipedia is a multilingual, free-content en- Wikimedia Commons was launched to pro- cyclopedia project. There are more than 200 vide a central repository for video, images, different language editions, with more than 4 music, and spoken text. Commons now has million articles, forming the largest publicly hundreds-of-thousands of multimedia fi les. available and editable knowledgebase. All fi les on Commons use free licenses, al- lowing them to be used for any purpose, even by non-Wikimedia projects. Wiktionary http://www.wiktionary.org Wiktionary is a project to create free- Wikisource content and thesauri in every http://www.wikisource.org language. Wikisource is a collection of free-content source documents, such as books, journals, laws, and letters. These documents are digitized, annotated and translated collabo- Wikibooks ratively by volunteers, and cross-referenced http://www.wikibooks.org in other relevant Wikimedia projects like Wikibooks aims to build a collection of Wikipedia. free e-book resources, including textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated Wikinews books. It aims to help both http://www.wikinews.org (self-)instruction of students, and teachers in high-schools and universities. Wikinews’ mission is to report news on a wide variety of subjects, providing a free- content alternative to commercial news; contributors from around the world collabo- Wikiquote rate on news articles. The articles in the cur- rently over 10 language editions are either http://www.wikiquote.org original reports or summaries of news from Wikiquote is a repository of quotations external sources. All articles are required to taken from famous people, books, speeches, be written from a neutral point of view. fi lms or any intellectually interesting materi- als. Proverbs, mnemonics or slogans are also included in Wikiquote.

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 Wikipedia

Working within these guidelines, the con- tributors to Wikipedia have surpassed some amazing milestones. On 1 January 2002 there were 18,000 articles across the 18 lan- guages, 2003 there were 138,000, 403,000 in 2004, in 2005 1,300,000 articles, and on 1 January 2006 there were 3,100,000 articles.

IKIPEDI WThe Free EncyclopediaA

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, written entirely by volunteers. With more than 4 million articles and over 200 language editions, it forms the largest publicly avail- able and editable knowledgebase.

The idea behind Wikipedia—creating a free On 1 July 2006 there were 4.6 million articles online encyclopedia—was not new on 15 in the project, the most recent complete sta- January 2001, when and Jimmy tistics available. The number of editors who Wales added the first English-language site were active in any given month has likewise to the project. The project was im- shown a steady growth. In the first month mediately popular, and by the end of the first of Wikipedia’s existence there were 9 active year was already growing in 18 languages, 26 editors. One year later the number was 205, by the end of the second, 46 the next, 161 834 in 2003, 3202 in 2004, 13,296 in 2005, the year after that. and 47,608 in January of 2006.

The project developed many of its core Numbers like these suggest why Wikipedia content principles in those first months and has become such a popular site according years, core ideas which remain guiding forces to internet traffic analyzers. Alexa reports as it continues to grow and develop. These that Wikipedia entered the top 20 websites principles are that articles should conform to by traffic in January 2006, plateauing a fairly a neutral point of view—not any one point steady rise. Wikipedia debuted on Com- of view—that article content should be veri- Score’s 50 hottest internet properties at 44 fiable, and that Wikipedia should not be a in September 2005, and rose to position 15 place to publish original research. by the September 2006 report.

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 Project statistics

Project founded Size, Languages Contributors New articles all languages (5 or more edits/month) per day Wikipedia 01/2001 4,300,000 articles 233 64936 8425 Wiktionary 12/2002 833,000 entries 173 778 2181 Wikiquote 07/2003 42,000 pages 87 369 79 Wikibooks 07/2003 35,000 modules 121 695 84 Wikisource 11/2003 97,500 texts 50 354 502 Commons 09/2004 800,000 files multilingual 645 122 Wikinews 12/2004 22,000 articles 22 259

Selected statistics, as of August 2006, source: http://stats.wikimedia.org

Growth statistics of the eight largest 1/2001-6/2006 english, german, french, polish, japonese, dutch, italian, svedish

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 The Wikimedia board and staff

The Wikimedia Foundation’s policies are set Florence Nibart-Devouard by a five member Board of Trustees, accord- Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees ing to the Foundation’s charter. Day-to-day operations are handled by the Executive Florence Nibart-Devouard Director. The Foundation employs software is the vice-chair of the developers to write and maintain the Medi- Foundation’s Board of aWiki code used on its projects, and system Trustees, re-elected by administrators to maintain the hardware the Wikimedia com- infrastructure. munity in July 2005. Florence was born in Jimbo Wales Versailles, France, and Chair of the Board of Trustees lived in several French cities, as well as Ant- Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales is werp in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. She the founder of Wikipe- is an engineer in Agronomy (ENSAIA) and dia and the chairman of also holds a DEA in Genetics and biotech- the Foundation’s Board nologies (INPL). She joined the Wikipedia of Trustees. Wales was adventure in February 2002 and is known born in Huntsville, Ala- under the pseudonym “Anthere”. Florence is bama, and is a graduate 37, and lives in Clermont Ferrand with her of Auburn University husband Bertrand and her three children. and the University of Alabama. He worked Erik Möller as Research Director Member of the Board of Trustees at Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in Erik Möller is an elected Chicago. member of the Founda- In 1999, Wales had the concept of a freely tion’s Board of Trustees. distributable encyclopedia, and founded He has been an active a project called Nupedia. This endeavour editor of Wikipedia failed primarily due to being a top-down since 2001 and has “cathedral” model, as opposed to Wikipe- also contributed to the dia, which is the ultimate “bazaar”. After underlying software, more than two years of struggle with the MediaWiki. Nupedia concept, Wikipedia was opened up Erik is a freelance journalist and author and to all and became an instant success. Wales also manages wiki-related software develop- lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his wife ment projects. Beyond Wikimedia, he seeks and daughter. to promote Free Content, , and balanced intellectual monopoly rights legislation.

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 The Wikimedia board and staff

Michael Davis Brad Patrick Treasurer of the Board of Trustees , Interim Executive Director Michael Davis is the Brad Patrick serves as treasurer of the Foun- general counsel to the dation’s Board of Trus- Wikimedia Foundation, tees. Formerly the CEO and on an interim basis of Chicago Options as Executive Director. Associates, a futures He previously practiced and options trading firm law with Fowler White in Chicago, Michael is Boggs Banker PA in Tampa, Florida, where of community-focused he specialized in - lectual property litiga- Wikia, and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. tion, computer law, technology and internet He is a graduate of Williams College and the issues. Prior to joining Fowler White Boggs University of Chicago. Banker, Brad practiced law in Seattle, Wash- ington with Preg O’Donnell & Gillett, a civil Tim Shell litigation firm with a great view of Lake Un- Secretary of the Board of Trustees ion. He began his career in Redmond, Wash- ington with the law firm of Magnuson Lowell, Tim Shell is the secre- P.S. Brad graduated from Colgate University tary of the Foundation’s in Hamilton, New York and Boston College Board of Trustees. Shell Law School in Newton, Massachusetts. is an Internet entrepre- neur with an interest in Brion Vibber self-organization, and Chief Technical Officer decentralized order, as exemplified by Wiki- Brion Vibber is the lead pedia. In 1996, Tim left developer and release his studies in computer manager of MediaWiki, science to go into , joining up with the wiki software Jimmy Wales to start . Shell currently used on all Wikimedia resides in Las Vegas. projects. He is 26 years old and lives in Califor- nia, USA. He has been involved as a developer for about three years, and has probably poked his finger into every development task, including maintenance of servers, performance improvement, de- velopment of features, debugging, and user interface.

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006 Contact and further information

Foundation Contact information Wikimedia Chapters Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Wikimedia CH 200 2nd Ave. South #358 http://www.wikimedia.ch St. Petersburg, FL 33701-4313 USA Email: [email protected] Phone: +1-727-231-0101 Fax: +1-727-258-0207 Wikimedia Deutschland http://www.wikimedia.de http://www.wikimediafoundation.org Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Wikimédia France Press Contact Information http://www.wikimedia.fr Email: [email protected] Please direct general press inquiries to: [email protected] Wikimedia Italia http://www.wikimedia.it This includes questions, comments, and gen- Email: [email protected] eral requests for interviews. Email sent to that address is handled by the Foundation’s Press . Wikimedia Nederland http://nl.wikimedia.org Additional press resources, including press Email: [email protected] contacts by country, can be found at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press Wikimedia Polska http://pl.wikimedia.org Email: [email protected]

Wikimedia Serbia http://sr.vikimedija.org Email: [email protected]

Wikimedia Information Kit, September 2006