Mission Statement
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
Description
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most visited websites, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews and the Wikimedia Commons media repository.
The Wikimedia Foundation relies primarily on donations and other contributions in order to run its operations.
The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of existing projects and is currently based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Foundation will relocate to San Francisco, California in the near future. Wikimedia has local chapters in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Serbia, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Poland.
