Community Central:Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization which runs Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Wikia is not a Wikimedia project, a for-profit arm of Wikipedia, or a sister project of Wikipedia. Wikia, Inc. and The Wikimedia Foundation are independant companies, though there are some relationships between them, as described below.

Company
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization which manages Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. Wikia is not a Wikimedia project. Wikia is run by a separate company, Wikia, Inc., which is independent of the Wikimedia Foundation, and therefore independent of Wikipedia.

People
Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia, and chair of Wikimedia's Board), and Angela Beesley (former member of Wikimedia's Board). Michael Davis is a member of Wikimedia's Board and the COO of Wikia. All of the community support staff have a volunteer role in Wikimedia, in terms of editing and/or answering emails sent to the Foundation. In fact, Wikia staff have a combined 35 years of Wikipedia experience! Kyle Anderson is a hardware consultant for both Wikimedia and Wikia and does work in the Tampa colo as needed. Tim Starling worked for Wikia before he was employed by Wikimedia.

There is obviously overlap in terms of the users reading and editing the site.

Offices
Wikia has offices in Menlo Park (Gil, John, and Jason are based here), Poznań (Emil and the Polish technical team are based here), and St. Petersburg (Jimmy, Michael and Terry are based here). Wikimedia shares the St. Petersburg office and Wikia donates about $1,000 worth of office space per month to them. All of Wikia community support team work remotely.

Donations
Wikia was one of the sponsors for Wikimania 2006. Wikia has advertised the Foundation's fundraising drives on its site. For example, Wikia's usual Google AdSense advertisements were replaced with a Wikimedia banner (view screenshot) during previous fundraising drives.

No donations given to Wikimedia have been, or ever will be, used for Wikia.

Hardware
Wikia and Wikimedia do not share any servers. Wikia and Wikimedia rent separate hardware within the same colo in Tampa, but Wikia is gradually moving to a new colo in San Jose. Until Wikia have completely moved out of the Tampa colo, they are buying internet access from the Wikimedia Foundation, and connecting to one of Wikimedia's switch ports. Wikia provides a mail server for use by some Wikimedia employees.

Content and software
All that Wikia receives from Wikimedia is the content and software, which are openly available to anyone to use under a free license (GFDL for the content, GPL for the software).

Wikia's engineers contribute enhancements to the open source MediaWiki software which all Wikimedia and Wikia projects use.

The content of most Wikimedia and Wikia projects is GFDL (Uncyclopedia, Memory-Alpha, and Wikinews are licensed under different Creative Commons licenses). Therefore, the projects, and other unrelated projects, are free to share content, so long as the terms of the relevant license are adhered to.

For more information about Wikimedia, please see Wikipedia's article on it.