Community Central:Wikimedia

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

The relationships between Wikimedia and Wikia
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.

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 (chair of Wikimedia's Advisory Board and former member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees). All of Wikia's community support staff have been volunteers at Wikimedia or one of the Wikimedia projects. In fact, Wikia's staff have a combined 62 years of Wikimedia experience! 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
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. Wikia moved out of these offices at the end of 2006. Though many of Wikia's staff work remotely, Wikia has offices in San Mateo, CA, New York, NY, and Poznań, Poland.

Donations
Wikia was one of the sponsors for Wikimania 2006 and 2007. 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. 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 San Jose, Iowa, New Jersey, and Poznań.

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 (primarily 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 (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.

Donate to Wikimedia

http://images.wikia.com/central/images/6/66/Wikipedia-free-mini-button.png

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