Mission
current (old) mission
The general purpose and objectives of the Foundation shall be the following: Wikimedia Foundation is dedicated to the development and maintenance of online free, open content encyclopedias, collections of quotations, textbooks and other collections of documents, information, and other informational databases in all the languages of the world that will be distributed free of charge to the public under a free documentation license such as the Free Documentation License written by the Free Software Foundation Inc. at http://www.fsf.org or similar licensing scheme, see http://www.wikimedia.org. The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. In addition to managing the already developed multilingual general encyclopedia and almanac named Wikipedia, (http://www.wikipedia.org) there is a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote, a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks and a collection of source works called Wikisource; other projects are envisioned. The Foundation also manages the operations of the largely dormant Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content).
new mission proposal 1
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower people around
the world to collect and develop knowledge under a free license, and
to disseminate it effectively and globally.
In collaboration with a
network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential
infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and
development of projects and endeavors which serve this mission.
new mission proposal 2
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage
people around the world to collect and develop knowledge under a free
license, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation
provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework
for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and
other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation is committed
to making and keeping all information from its projects available on
the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.