Values/2008

In a very wiki way, values only stay values while most agree with them.

Wikimedia Foundation values

Freedom

An essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is encouraging the development of free-content educational resources that may be created, used, and reused by the entire human community. We believe that this mission requires thriving open formats and open standards on the web to allow the creation of content not subject to restrictions on creation, use, and reuse.

At the creation level, we want to provide the editing community with freely-licensed tools for participation and collaboration. Our community should also have the freedom to fork thanks to freely available dumps.

The community will in turn create a body of knowledge which can be distributed freely throughout the world, viewable or playable by free software tools.

Accessibility and quality

All the legal freedom to modify or distribute educational content is useless if users cannot get access to it.

We try our best to give online access to high quality Wikimedia project content 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, as well as provide access to regularly updated, user-friendly, and free dumps of Wikimedia project content.

We try, through partnerships if necessary, to ensure the widest distribution, through DVD's, books, PDF's, or other non-internet based means.

To ensure world-wide, unrestricted, dissemination of knowledge, we do not enter into exclusive partnerships, with regards to access to our content or use of our trademarks.

Independence

As a non-profit, we mostly depend on gifts to operate (donations, grants, sponsorship, etc.). It is very important to us to ensure our organization stays free of influence in the way it operates. For this reason, we strictly follow a donation policy, reserve the right to refuse donations which could generate constraints, and try to multiply the diversity of revenue sources.

Commitment to openness and diversity

Though US-based, the organization is international in its nature. Our board of trustees, staff members, and volunteers are involved without discrimination based on their religion, political beliefs, sexual preferences, nationalities, etc... Not only do we accept diversity, but we actually look forward to it.

Transparency

We must communicate Wikimedia Foundation information in a transparent, thorough and timely manner, to our communities and more generally, to the public.

Our communities are our biggest asset

We are a community-based organization. We must operate with a mix of staff members, and of volunteers, working together to achieve our mission.

We support community-led collaborative projects, and must respect the work and the ideas of our communities. We must listen and take into account our communities in any decisions taken to achieve our mission.