Help:Wikimedia

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

To avoid confusion, please be aware of what Wikia is and what Wikia is not.


 * Wikia is not a Wikimedia project.
 * Wikia is not a for-profit arm of Wikipedia
 * Wikia is not a sister project of Wikipedia.

Wikia, Inc. and The Wikimedia Foundation are independent companies, though there are some relationships between them, as described below.

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.

Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia, and former chair, now member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees), and Angela Beesley Starling (member of Wikimedia's Advisory Board and former member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees).

Wikia was one of the sponsors for Wikimania 2006 to 2009 and has made other donations to the Foundation. No donations given to Wikimedia have been, or ever will be, used for Wikia.

Wikia and Wikimedia do not share any servers. Some of Wikia's servers were previously located in the same colocation center as some of Wikimedia's servers in Florida. Wikia previously provided a mail server for use by some Wikimedia employees. Wikia's servers are now located in colocation centers in the US and Europe.

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

All that Wikia receives from Wikimedia is the content and software, which are openly available to anyone to use under a free license (primarily CC-BY-SA for the content, GPL for the software). The content of most Wikimedia and Wikia projects is CC-BY-SA (there are exceptions to this within both projects). Therefore, the projects, and other unrelated projects, are free to share content, so long as the terms of the relevant license is adhered to.

For more information about Wikimedia, please see Wikipedia's article on it or visit the Wikimedia Foundation's website at wikimediafoundation.org.

See also the related press release from Wikimedia.