| Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California. WMF owns and operates the Wikimedia projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation has the stated goal of developing and maintaining open content, wiki-based projects and providing the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. Another objective is political advocacy.
It was established in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a way to fund Wikipedia and its sibling projects through non-profit means. As of 2021, it employs over 550 staff and contractors, with annual revenues in excess of US$150 million.
In 2001, Jimmy Wales, an Internet entrepreneur, and Larry Sanger, an online community organizer and philosophy professor, founded Wikipedia as an Internet encyclopedia to supplement Nupedia. The project was originally funded by Bomis, Jimmy Wales's for-profit business. As Wikipedia's popularity increased, revenues to fund the project stalled.
The name "Wikimedia", a compound of wiki and media, was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English mailing list in March 2003, three months after Wiktionary became the second wiki-based project hosted on Wales' platform.
On December 11, 2006, the foundation's board noted that the corporation could not become the membership organization initially planned but never implemented due to an inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida statutory law.
In September 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation's application to become an observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was blocked after objections from the government of China over the existence of a Wikimedia Foundation affiliate in Taiwan.
On March 16, 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product designed to sell and deliver Wikipedia's content directly to Big Tech companies.
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