Mission:
To encourage the growth, development, and distribution of free, multi-lingual content, and to provide the full content of these "wiki"-based projects to the public free of charge.

Background:
The Wikimedia Foundation, also known simply as Wikimedia, was created by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales in 2003 and is the parent organization of various collaboratively edited free-content reference projects, most notably the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The foundation owns the servers, domain names, and trademarks of all its projects. Contributors retain the copyright to their own content, but because of the type of license used for the projects, anyone can copy, redistribute, and modify content. Each Wikimedia project relies on donations, grants, or sponsorships.

Outstanding Web Features:
The Wikimedia Web site links to all the foundation's projects, including its initial one, Wikipedia, which began in January 2001 in English and now has more than 3.3 million articles in over 125 languages; Wiktionary, a multi-lingual dictionary with about 150,000 entries; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations; and Wikimedia Commons, a repository for free video, images, music, spoken texts, and other free media that can easily be reused by all Wikimedia projects. Other projects are Wikispecies, a species directory with more than 300,000 items; Wikibooks, a collection of free, open-content textbooks; and Wikinews, currently in the beta stage.