Wikimedia Foundation founded by Jimmy Wales
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF), is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best known as the hosting platform for Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, it also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.The Wikimedia Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida, by Jimmy Wales as a nonprofit way to fund Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other crowdsourced wiki projects that had until then been hosted by Bomis, Wales's for-profit company. The Foundation finances itself mainly through millions of small donations from Wikipedia readers, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia and its sister projects. These are complemented by grants from philanthropic organizations and tech companies, and starting in 2022, by services income from Wikimedia Enterprise.
The Foundation has grown rapidly throughout its existence. By 2022, it employed around 700 staff and contractors, with annual revenues of US$155 million, annual expenses of US$146 million, net assets of US$240 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed US$100 million in June 2021.History
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as a feeder project to supplement Nupedia. The project was originally funded by Bomis, Wales's for-profit business, and edited by a rapidly growing community of volunteer editors. The early community discussed a variety of ways to support the ongoing costs of upkeep, and was broadly opposed to running ads on the site, so the idea of setting up a charitable foundation gained prominence. That also addressed an open question of what entity should hold onto trademarks for the project. 
The name "Wikimedia", a compound of wiki and media, was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English Wikipedia mailing list in March 2003, three months after Wiktionary became the second wiki-based project hosted on the original server. The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated in Florida on June 20, 2003.  A small fundraising campaign to keep the servers running was run in October 2003.  The Foundation was granted section 501(c)(3) status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity in 2005, making donations to the Foundation tax-deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code is B60 (Adult, Continuing education).The Foundation applied to trademark the name Wikipedia in the US on September 14, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004, and by the European Union on January 20, 2005. Subsets of Wikipedia were already being distributed in book and DVD form, and there were discussions about licensing the logo and wordmark.On December 11, 2006, the Foundation's board noted that it could not become a membership organization, as initially planned but not implemented, due to an inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida statutory law. The bylaws were accordingly amended to remove all references to membership rights and activities.In 2007, the Foundation decided to move its headquarters from Florida to the San Francisco Bay Area. Considerations cited for choosing San Francisco were proximity to like-minded organizations and potential partners, a better talent pool, as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel. The move was completed by January 31, 2008, into a headquarters on Stillman Street in San Francisco. It later moved to New Montgomery Street, and then to One Montgomery Tower.On October 25, 2021, the Foundation launched Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial Wikimedia content delivery service aimed at groups that want to use high-volume APIs, starting with Big Tech enterprises. In June 2022, Google and the Internet Archive were announced as the service's first customers, though only Google will pay for the service. The same announcement noted a shifting focus towards smaller companies with similar data needs, supporting the service through "a lot paying a little".three selected by the community encompassed by all the different Wikimedia projects;
two selected by Wikimedia chapters;
four appointed by the board itself; and
one founder's seat, reserved for Jimmy Wales.Over time, the size of the board and details of the selection processes have evolved.  As of 2020, the board may have up to 16 trustees:
eight seats sourced from the wider Wikimedia community (affiliates and volunteer community);
seven appointed by the board itself; and
one founder's seat reserved for Wales.As of February 2023, the board comprised six community-and-affiliate-selected trustees (Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Dariusz Jemielniak, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Victoria Doronina, Mike Peel and Lorenzo Losa); five Board-appointed trustees (McKinsey & Company director Raju Narisetti, Bahraini human rights activist and blogger Esra'a Al Shafei, management consulting executive Lisa Lewin, Nataliia Tymkiv, and McAfee executive Tanya Capuano); and Wales. Tymkiv chairs the board, with Al Shafei and Sigalov as vice chairs.In 2015, James Heilman, a trustee recently elected to the board by the community, was removed from his position by a vote of the rest of the board. This decision generated dispute among members of the Wikipedia community. Heilman later said that he "was given the option of resigning [by the Board] over the last few weeks. As a community elected member I see my mandate as coming from the community which elected me and thus declined to do so. I saw such a move as letting down those who elected me." He subsequently added that while on the Board, he had pushed for greater transparency regarding the Wikimedia Foundation's Knowledge Engine project and its financing, and indicated that his attempts to make public the Knight Foundation grant for the engine had been a factor in his dismissal. Heilman was reelected to the board by the community in 2017.In January 2016, Arnnon Geshuri joined the board before stepping down amid community controversy about a "no poach" agreement he executed when at Google, which violated United States antitrust law and for which the participating companies paid US$415 million in a class action suit on behalf of affected employees.
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