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The goals of the foundation are to develop and maintain open contentOpen content coined by analogy with " open source," (though technically it is actually share-alike) describes any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the, wikiWiki A Wiki or wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weekee", see pronunciation section below) is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows a user to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by anybody.-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of chargeGratis is a term in Latin and various Romance and Germanic languages (e. English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, German, Norwegian, Dutch) meaning free, in the sense that one does not have to pay for some good or service free of charge .. In addition to managing the already developed multilingual general encyclopediaEncyclopaedia Britannica An encyclopedia (alternatively encyclopaedia is a written compendium of human knowledge. The term comes from the Greek words , enkyklios paideia ("in a circle of instruction"). From , circuit shaped from circuit and , meaning inst Wikipedia, there is a multi-language dictionaryFor other uses of "dictionary", see dictionary (disambiguation). A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. Many dictionaries also provide and thesaurusThe word thesaurus is New Latin for treasure; coined in the early 1820s. Besides its meaning as a treasury or storehouse, it more commonly means a listing of words with similar or related meanings. For example, a book of jargon for a specialized field; or named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotationThis article is about quoting. For information about the punctuation mark, see Quotation mark A quotation is a fragment of a human expression that is being referred to by somebody else. Most often a quotation is taken from literature, but also sentences fs named Wikiquote, a repository of source texts in any language named Wikisource, and a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks. The Foundation also manages a memorial collection of articles about the Sept. 11 attacks and the operations of the largely dormant Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content). The continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects is dependent on donations. The Wikimedia Foundation aims to increase revenue by finding alternative means of financing, including grants and sponsorship.

With the Foundation's announcement, Wales also transferred ownership of all Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Nupedia domain names to Wikimedia along with the copyrights for all materials related to these projects that were created by Bomis employees or Wales himself. The computer equipment used to run all the Wikimedia projects was also donated by Wales to the Foundation. The domain names wikimedia.org and wikimediafoundation.org were secured for the Foundation by Wikipedia contributor Daniel Mayer. As of June 2004, Wikimedia's bandwidth and power is donated to the project by Bomis.

In January 2004, Jimmy Wales appointed Tim Shell and Michael Davis to the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation. In June 2004, an election was held for two user representative Board members. Following one month of campaigning and two weeks of online voting, Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to join the board. Further, Tim Starling was appointed Developer Liaison to help improve the organisation of the development of the MediaWiki software.

The name "Wikimedia" was coined by Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English Wikipedia's mailing list in March 2003. It is occasionally criticised for its similarity to the name of Wikipedia which leads to confusion among people new to the project.