All About Wiki .

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco, California, It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary,Wikiquote, Wikibooks,Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies,Wikinews, Wikiversity,Wikimedia Incubator and Meta-Wiki. The creation of the foundation was officially announced on June 20, 2003 byWikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, operating Wikipedia under the aegis of his company Bomis(founded by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell, and provided support for the free encyclopedia projectsNupedia and Wikipedia.) The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003. The name "Wikimedia" was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English mailing list in March 2003.
Beyond the Encyclopedia: The Frontiers of Free Knowledge - presentation by Erik Mller about state of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects in 2010

Wikimedia Projects
Name Web address Launche d Description Wikipedia wikipedia.org Meta-Wiki meta.wikimedia.org Wiktionary wiktionary.org Wikibooks wikibooks.org Wikiquote wikiquote.org Wikisource wikisource.org 2001-01- Encyclopedia containing more than 13 million articles 15 in 266 languages. 2001-11- Wiki devoted to the coordination of the Wikimedia 09 projects. 2002-12- Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, 12 etymologies and translations. 2003-07- Collection of free educational textbooks and learning 10 materials. 2003-07Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways. 10 2003-11- Project to provide and translate free source documents, 24 such as public domain texts.

Wikimedia 2004-09- Repository of images, sounds, videos and commons.wikimedia.org Commons 07 general media, containing over 6 million files. Wikimedia 2006-06- Used to test possible new languages for existing incubator.wikimedia.org Incubator 02 projects. Wikispecie species.wikimedia.org s Wikinews wikinews.org Directory of species data 2004-09on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista a 13 nd all other forms of life. 2004-12- News source containing original reporting by citizen 03 journalists from many countries. 2006-08Educational and research materials and activities. 15 Promotion of Wikimedia projects Strategy planning work for all Wikimedia projects

Wikiversity wikiversity.org

Wikimedia outreach.wikimedia.org 200910 Outreach Wikimedia Strategic strategy.wikimedia.org planning summer 2009

Wikimedia Usability usability.wikimedia.org 2008 Initiative Wikimania wikimania.wikimedia.or g

Usability team wiki Wikimania conference websites Test wiki that runs a recent version of MediaWiki Survey aggregation website

Wikipedia test.wikipedia.org Test Wiki Wikimedia survey.wikimedia.org Surveys

Wikipedia
Slogan The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Launched

January 15, 2001 (9 years ago)

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online Englishlanguage encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.
Here, as in other human endeavours, it is evident that the active attention of many, when concentrated on one point, produces excellence. Goethe, The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object, 1772

the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars"

The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are summarized in the form of five "pillars":
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. It incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not asoapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory. It is not a dictionary, newspaper, or a collection of source documents; that kind of content should be contributed instead to the Wikimedia sister projects. Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. We strive for articles that advocate no single point of view. Sometimes this requires representing multiple points of view, presenting each point of view accurately and in context, and not presenting any point of view as "the truth" or "the best view". All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy: unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here. That means citing verifiable, authoritative sources, especially on controversial topics and when the subject is a living person. When conflict arises over neutrality, discuss details on the talk page, and follow dispute resolution.

Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit and distribute. Respect copyright laws, and avoid plagiarizing your sources. Since all your contributions are freely licensed to the public, no editor owns any article; all of your contributions can and will be mercilessly edited and redistributed. Wikipedians should interact in a respectful and civil manner. Respect and be polite to your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and avoid personal attacks. Find consensus, avoid edit wars, and remember that there are 3,527,786 articles on the English Wikipedia to work on and discuss. Act in good faith, never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, and assume good faith on the part of others. Be open andwelcoming. Wikipedia does not have firm rules. Rules on Wikipedia are not fixed in stone, and the spirit of the rule trumps the letter of the rule. Be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes. Your efforts do not need to be perfect; prior versions are saved, so no damage is irreparable.

John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool.
historian Roy Rosenzweig claimed that: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia.
Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikimania is an annual international conference for users of the wiki projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation Wikimania 2011 will be held August 47 in Haifa, Israel. Registration to the conference has started on January 1 2011. Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project,[2] which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than formal content. Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article."

The first[7] recorded proposal of a Wikimedia news site was a two-line anonymous post on January 5, 2003, on Wikipedia community's Meta-Wiki.[8] Daniel Alston, who edited Wikipedia as Fonzy,[9] claimed to have been the one who posted it. Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive free contentcatalogue of all species and is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Benedikt Mandl co-ordinated the efforts of several people who are interested in getting involved with the project and contacted potential supporters in early summer 2004.
The Wikimedia Incubator is where potential Wikimedia Foundation wikis of existing Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote and Wikinews Wikisource and Wikiversity) have their own wikis in additional languages should be arranged, written, tested, and proven worthy of Wikimedia hosting. Before its creation on 2 June 2006, the test projects were here at Meta.

Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files.[2] It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, from which uploaded files can be used across all Wikimedia projects[3] in all languages, including Wikipedia,Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikinews, or downloaded for offsite use. The repository contains over eight million media files. The project was proposed by Erik Mller in March 2004[5] and launched on September 7, 2004

Wikisource is an online library of free content textual sources, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to harbour all forms of free text, in many languages. It also provides translation efforts to this end. The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg). It then began its activity at a mistaken location, when source texts were placed at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood "PS" to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg, and they erroneously took over the subdomain of the Pashto language's Wikipedia.[citation needed][clarification needed] Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films and proverbs, and to give details about them with appropriate attribution.
Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a Wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

Open books for an open world

Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that content on Wikibooks is expected to be significantly changed by participants. Raw source documents such as the original text of Karan Sharma are hosted on Wikisource instead.