Community Central:Wikimedia


 * Contrary to misunderstandings in the press, Wikia is not a Wikimedia project. The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization which manages Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It is not affiliated financially with Wikia. We encourage you to donate to Wikimedia projects in the current fundraising drive of the Wikimedia Foundation. Give the Gift of Knowledge and  donate  at wikimediafoundation.org.

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

To avoid confusion, please aware of 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.

The relationships between Wikimedia and Wikia
Wikia, Inc. and The Wikimedia Foundation are independent 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 former chair, now member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees), and Angela Beesley (former member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees). Michael Davis is a member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees and the COO of Wikia. All of Wikia's community support staff have a volunteer role at Wikimedia, either editing or answering emails sent to the Foundation. In fact, Wikia's staff have a combined 40 years of Wikipedia experience! Kyle Anderson is a hardware consultant for both Wikimedia and Wikia and maintains the hardware in the Tampa colo. Tim Starling and Brad Patrick worked for Wikia before being employed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Kat Walsh was employed by Wikia before joining Wikimedia's Board of Trustees.

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

Offices
Wikia has offices in San Mateo, Poznań, and St. Petersburg. All of Wikia's 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.

In 2006, Wikia donated part of its excess office space in St. Petersburg to the Wikimedia Foundation. The value of the donation was about $12,000.

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 the majority of Wikia's servers are now located in a colocation center in San Jose. Wikia buys internet access from the Wikimedia Foundation for usage within the Tampa colo, and connects 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.