Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California. The Foundation is best known for hosting Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, and other related projects. The Wikimedia Foundation was established in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a non-profit way to fund Wikipedia and other crowdsourced wiki projects.

The Board of Trustees is responsible for the Foundation’s strategic direction. The Board is composed of members who are elected by the Wikimedia community, members appointed by the rest of the Board for their expertise, and members selected by Wikimedia movement affiliates. The Board guides the Foundation’s mission, which is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”

The Foundation provides the technical and organizational infrastructure to enable members of the public to develop wiki content in multiple languages. It does not write or curate any of the content on the wikis itself; this is done by volunteers, such as the Wikipedians who create and maintain Wikipedia. The Foundation collaborates with a network of individual volunteers and affiliated organizations all over the world, and promises in its mission statement to make useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge in perpetuity.

María Sefidari Huici served as the chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees until June 3, 2021. She was re-elected to the position in August 2019. Sefidari was a founding member of Wikimedia España, the Spanish chapter of the Wikimedia movement, and she served on its Board as its first vice president. In June 2013, Sefidari was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees by the community of Wikipedia editors.

You can find more information on the Wikimedia Foundation and María Sefidari on their respective Wikipedia pages.