WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is an American non-profit and charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, that operates many wikis. The foundation is mostly known for hosting Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia which ranks in the top-ten most-visited websites worldwide; as well as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Incubator, and Meta-Wiki. The organization was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, as a way to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects through non-profit means. (More from Wikipedia)
In the beginning, no one thought that a globally collaborative encyclopedia like Wikipedia would create anything reliable or worthwhile, but it has become the sixth most popular site on the Internet, and there must be dozens of similar "wiki" sites now (some are part of the associated non-profit Wikimedia Foundation while others are not).
(August 2012)
