Internal:Press kit
Wikimedia
"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." - Jimmy Wales
Wikimedia is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the development and distribution of free multilingual content. It hosts various free-content projects, most notably Wikipedia, the award-winning online encyclopedia. Other online projects include Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary; Wikibooks, a collection of free-content textbooks; Wikiquote, a repository of famous quotes; and Wikisource, a repository for primary-source materials.
The Wikimedia Foundation, founded on June 20, 2003, is based in Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA. It owns the Wikimedia servers along with the domain names and trademarks of all Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki. The organisation relies entirely on public donations to meet its goal of providing free knowledge to every person in the world.
Free content
All content of the Wikimedia projects is available under a free license. Similar to Free software licenses used for projects like Linux, the GNU Free Documentation license allows anyone to copy, distribute, sell and modify the content, on condition that he credits the author and preserves the license which gives anyone else the same rights.
Wikiwiki – “fast” in Hawaian
Invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, Wiki software makes it possible to create a dynamic website, in which all users can edit a webpage quickly and easily, using their personal web browsers.
A simple formatting language is used which anyone can learn it in just a few minutes. For example, to italicize text, surround it with two apostrophes; use three for bolded text, and enclose a word in two brackets ([[]]) to create a link to another page in the wiki. The wiki software used by the Wikimedia projects is called Mediawiki, and was developed with the specific goal of creating an encyclopedia in mind. Similar to the content written on the wiki, the Mediwiki software is published under a free license, the GPL. Beside the Wikimedia projects, it is used as a collaborative knowledge management tool in international organisations, universities and companies.
Wikipedia
Project profile
- one of the top 50 websites of the world (based on alexa.com)
- 27 million visits per day in the English wikipedia, 8 million in the German edition
- more than 2.2 million articles, with 660 000 in the English edition and about 260 000 in german
- exists in more than 100 languages, biggest in size English, German, French, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch and Polish
Wikipedia was founded on the belief that virtually everybody has some knowledge that they can share with others. It began as an English-language project on January 15, 2001 and was soon joined by a German and French edition, and in a short time by many other languages. The online encyclopedia is written entirely by volunteers. Thanks to the Wiki principle, anyone can create or modify an article instantly, so that no article has a single author. Instead, tens and even hundreds of people work together, sharing what they know to edit and improve the content. The result is a never-ending “work in progress,” always getting more thorough and always getting better.
Its editors range in age from seven to seventy and beyond, each of them contributing a little something to help make this the most well-rounded collaborative educational effort ever seen. We believe that every single person has the right to learn, but also that everyone has something that they can (and should) teach others.
Contributors can create an account with a user name and a password, but this is not required. Much of our best work comes from anonymous users, many of them just passing through, who notice a little something that they can tidy up. Many of them become hooked, and are soon an integral part of the Wikipedia volunteer community. Our neutral point of view policy encourages people from diverse backgrounds to work together.
All original material contributed to Wikipedia is considered to be free content under the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that all of our content can be freely used, freely edited, freely copied, and freely redistributed, subject to the restrictions of that license.
Wikipedia’s sister projects
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004, with the goal of providing a central repository for free images, music and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, to be used by all Wikimedia projects. The project allows its resources, images and sound files, to be reused across other Wikimedia projects. As of June 2005, it has over 150,000 multimedia files including images and sound files.
Wikinews
The Wikinews project is currently in the beta stage. It was launched in December 2004 with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. Since February 2004, there have been seven languages in the Wikinews project. Contributors from around the world write news articles collaboratively. Reports range from original reports to summaries of news from external sources. All of them are required to be written from a neutral point of view. Currently Wikinews has two aims: providing a free content alternative to commercial news sites and making sure that articles are fact-checked and reviewed thoroughly.
Wikisource
Wikisource, started in November, 2003, aims to build a collection of primary source texts. It serves Wikimedia‘s other projects as a useful archive of classics, laws, and other free texts.
Wikibooks
Wikibooks is a multilingual project to build a collection of free and open content e-book resources aimed specifically toward students. The project includes textbooks, manuals, and annotated public domain books. It aims to help both (self-)instruction of students and teachers in high-schools and universities. The project began in July, 2003 and has approximately 5,000 modules in 250 books in six languages.
Wikiquote
Wikiquote is a repository of quotations. Quotations are taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Not only those quotes but proverbs, mnemonics or slogans are documented on Wikiquote.
The project started in July 2003, first as an English project but in June 2004 became multilingual and was divided into subdomains by language. As of July 2005, it included close to 15,000 pages in 70 language projects. The largest Wikiquote project is in English with over 4,000 pages. Following English Wikiquote, German, French, Polish, Bulgaria and Portuguese editions have over 1,000 articles each.
Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a project to create free content dictionaries and thesauruses in every language. The project started in December 2002 and was devided into subdomains by language in May 2004. Wiktionary is now available in 146 languages with almost 200 000 pages. The largest Wiktionary is in English, followed by Polish, Bulgarian and Dutch.
Who is who in Wikimedia?
Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales
Jimmy “Jimbo“ Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), is the founder of Wikipedia and the president of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in Chicago.
In 1999, Wales had the concept of a freely distributable encyclopedia and founded Nupedia. Nupedia failed primarily due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. After more than 2 years of struggle with the Nupedia concept, Wikipedia was opened to become an instant success.
Wales is currently the president of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wales is married, and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife and daughter.
Florence Devouard (Anthere)
Florence Nibart-Devouard is the vice-chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, elected by the Wikimedia community in July 2005. Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. She is a engineer in Agronomy (ENSAIA and also holds a DEA in Genetics and biotechnologies (INPL). She has been working in public research, first in flower plant genetic improvement, and second in microbiology to study the feasability of polluted soil bioremediation. She is currently employed in a french firm, to conceive decision-making tools in sustainable agriculture. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in February 2002 and is known as a contributor under the pseudonym Anthere. Florence is 36, and live in Clermont Ferrand with her husband Bertrand and her two children, Anne-Gaëlle aged six and William eight.
Angela Beesley
Angela Beesley is the Executive Secretary of the Wikimedia Foundation, a post to which she was elected by the community in July 2005. Angela was born in Norwich, England in 1977 and grew up in Maidstone and Colchester. She holds an honours degree in psychology. During a year out from Aston University, and for a period after graduating, Angela worked as a research assistant in the Aston Dyslexia and Developmental Assessment Centre. She then worked for the National Foundation for Educational Research, based in Berkshire, as a developer of the national statutory assessments for England and Wales. Angela currently lives in Berlin and manages Wikicities, which she founded with Jimmy Wales in October 2004.
Brion Vibber
Brion Vibber is lead developer and release manager of Mediawiki, the Wiki software used on all the Wikimedia projects. He is 26 years old and lives in California, USA. He has been involved as a developer for about 3 years and has probably poked his finger in every development task, from maintenance of servers, performance improvement, development of features, debugging, interface, to „hotline“.
Press clippings
"One of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age...extraordinary..." (Dan Gillmor, San José Mercury News, Jan. 29, 2004)
"It's called Wikipedia and, like Google, it is one of the wonders of the world." (John Naughton, The Observer, September 12, 2004)
More information
On the web
International press contact
- Jimmy Wales, Board of Trustees Chair, Wikimedia Foundation
- Email: jwales@wikimedia.org
- Phone: (+1)-727-527-9776
- Elisabeth Bauer, press officer, Wikimedia Foundation
- Email: elian@wikimedia.org
- Phone +49 (0)173-355-8645
Germany
- Kurt Jansson, Telefon 030 - 610 74 581
- Arne Klempert, Telefon 0175 - 93 542 93