Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is an American charitable organisation that runs Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects.
==Activities==
The Foundation does not set Wikipedia's editorial policy.
To acknowledge the diversity of their contributors, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees recognizes chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups, as models of affiliation within the Wikimedia movement.
== Name==
The word "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick."
==List of projects==
*Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia
*Wiktionary, a collaborative lexical database, with definitions, etymologies, and pronunciations
*WikiBooks, an open-content textbooks collection
*WikiQuote, a collaborative free quote database
*WikiVoyage, a free open-source travel guide
*Wikisource, a library of free textual sources
*WikiNews, a free-content news wiki
*WikiVersity, a project for learning resources, projects, and research for use in education
*WikiData, a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It acts as central storage for the structured data of its sister projects.
==History==
The Wikimedia Foundation was created on June 20, 2003, by Jimmy Wales. He shifted Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Foundation was originally based in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Jimmy Wales lived when he founded it. In 2008, the Foundation relocated from Tampa Bay, Florida, to San Francisco, primarily to be closer to the United States' high-tech centre.
On December 13, 2007, the Foundation announced a partnership allowing users to obtain print and word processor copies of Wikimedia articles. It was supported by the and the , and led by .
In 2013, the Foundation moved to a data centre in . The previous data centre, located in Tampa, Florida, became a backup. In 2014, they obtained a data centre in Texas. The decision was influenced by Texas' independent power grid, useful in the case of an outage, which knocked Wikipedia offline in 2012.
In September 2020, the Foundation applied to become an observer at the , but this was blocked by China, due to issues related to Taiwan.
In March 2021, It was first made Wikimedia Enterprise for Web API.
In March 2022 the Foundation announced www.wikimediastatus.net, a status page to be updated during major outages to Wikimedia projects.
===Controversy===
In December 2007, Carolyn Bothwell Doran, the Foundation's former COO, was revealed to have an extensive criminal record, including theft, a hit-and-run accident, and wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest.
In March 2008, Jimmy Wales was accused of improperly using the Foundation's funds for his own recreation, and breaking Wikipedia's conflict of interest rules by attempting to influence the site's editing process. He denied any wrongdoing.
In February 2016, Lisa Tretikov, the head of the Foundation, unexpectedly resigned, following controversy over a grant for a search engine.
====Legal cases====
In August 2008, a judge in New Jersey exempted Wikipedia from a defamation trial based on comments posted by its users. The case was filed by a literary agent, Barbara Bauer, whose name appeared on a list of the 20 Worst Literary Agents, on a now-defunct website. The Wikimedia Foundation was named as a defendant in her suit.
In April 2009, artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern attempted to create a performance art piece by establishing a Wikipedia entry entitled "Wikipedia Art," which could be freely edited. The page lasted fifteen hours before being deleted by Wikipedia admins for failing to be encyclopedic. The artists' archive and discussion of the project was threatened with legal action over copyright infringement by the Foundation's legal counsel. The artists intended the article to be a critique of Wikipedia as an information source.
In November 2013, in a libel case, a German court ruled that the Foundation is liable for the contents of Wikipedia articles, but only has a duty to fact-check the contents if somebody complains about the article.
In March 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation filed a lawsuit against the United States , over surveillance of internet traffic, "to protect the rights" of Wikipedia users worldwide. The lawsuit said that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance of Internet traffic on American soil violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects the right to privacy, and the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression and association. It was filed with the help of the . It was dismissed the following October, as Wikimedia could not prove that they had been affected.
=== YouTube ===
On August 4, 2007, Wikimedia Foundation created their YouTube Channel, however, No Videos would be Uploaded until October 29, 2008.
On October 29, 2008, Wikimedia Foundation uploaded their First Video titled "Free Access To All Human Knowledge".
==Funding==
The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations.
About half of their income goes towards software engineering and new technology, and much of the rest goes towards outreach to editors.
It has a permanent Endowment Fund, which helps protect Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in times of uncertainty, and enables long-term investments to support their growth. It is governed independently from the Wikimedia Foundation. Donations and grants are used to support the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual operations, separate from the Endowment.
===Criticism===
The foundation has been criticised for collecting donations from readers using fundraising banners, despite not struggling financially.
According to a 2013 estimate, the Foundation could keep Wikipedia online on $10 million a year. It has used the funds to hire additional staff, and put money aside. In 2021, the Foundation launched a for-profit company named Wikimedia, LLC, which sells services to big technology companies, making it easier for them to process Wikimedia content. Many editors saw profits as potentially corrupting.
In July 2014, the Foundation began accepting donations in Bitcoin. In February 2022, a long-time editor wrote in , that this was "no longer ethical" due to its environmental and social impacts. This led the Foundation to stop accepting cryptocurrency, which made up 0.08% of total contributions in 2021.
==References==
Category:Educational YouTubers
Category:Tech YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2007