このページでは、ウィキメディア財団によく寄せられるご質問にお答えします。その他の質問については、こちら をご参照ください。答えが見つからない場合は、お気軽にお問い合わせください。
ウィキペディアとは何ですか。
ウィキペディアとは、インターネットの百科事典です。2001年の開始から、世界中のボランティア編集者が、ウィキペディアの記事を執筆しています。記事は、誰でも好きなときに編集できます。ウィキペディアの編集者は、歴史や科学、芸術などあらゆるテーマを共同で執筆しています。ウィキペディアは何百もの言語で利用でき、記事数は累計4,500万件を超えます。ウィキペディアは独立した非営利のサイトで、あなたのような一般の人々によって維持されています。ウィキペディアの編集に、承認や特別な資格は必要ありません。
ウィキペディアは、情報の中立性と信頼性をどう保っていますか。
ウィキペディアのボランティア編集者は、記事の内容を裏付ける信頼できる参照文献を明記することで、読者が情報源で事実を確認できるようにしています。ウィキペディアに記事を残すためには、中立的な視点で書かれ、信頼できる情報源に基づいていることが条件です。編集者は、ボットや監視ツールなどを活用することで、ウィキペディアに加えられた変更を定期的に確認しています。こうした努力により、ウィキペディアは中立性と信頼性を保っているのです。ウィキペディアはオープンソース（誰にも開かれている）であるため、そのコンテンツは常に進化し、成長し、改善されていきます。コンテンツの変更にまつわる議論を追うこともできます。残念ながら、まれに記事の[[:ja:Wikipedia:荒らし |荒らし]]行為が起こりますが、大多数の編集者は善意で投稿しています。荒らし行為の大半はすぐに、多くは数秒内に削除されます。
ウィキメディア財団とは何ですか
ウィキメディア財団は、「すべての人に無償の知識を届ける」というミッションのもと、ウィキペディアを始めとする無償のナレッジサイトをサポートする非営利団体です。ウィキメディアサイトを高速かつ安全に保ち、すべての人が利用できるようにし、ウィキペディアとそのボランティア編集者を法的な脅威から守っています。サイトの記事を読み、編集し、知識を共有しやすくするための機能やツールを開発し、ウィキペディアやその他のサイトに貢献する編集者コミュニティを支えています。新しい知識をオンライン化し、アクセスの障壁を減らし、知っていることを誰もが簡単に共有できるようにします。
ウィキメディア財団は、アメリカ合衆国カリフォルニア州サンフランシスコにオフィスを構える非課税の非営利団体 (501(c)(3)) です。
ウィキメディア財団が支援するその他の無償のナレッジプロジェクトを教えてください。
ウィキメディア財団が支援するプロジェクトには、ウィキペディアのほかに以下があります：
- ウィキメディア・コモンズ ー ライセンスフリーのイメージ、ビデオ、ファイルのデータベース。
- ウィクショナリ ー – 多言語辞書。
- ウィキクォート – 著名人や創造性豊かな作品からの引用句集。
- ウィキブックス – 注釈付きの参考書や教科書。
- ウィキソース － 次資料や元本の翻訳集。
- ウィキスピーシーズ – 動物、植物、菌、細菌、古細菌、原生生物やその他の生物の分類表。
- ウィキニュース – 世界中の出来事について誰でもレポートできる共同ニュース源。
- ウィキバーシティ – 学年を問わず教育の場で使用できる情報源やプロジェクト、研究のデータベース。
- ウィキデータ – ウィキメディアの関連プロジェクトで使用される情報を支える、共同で多言語のデータベース。
- ウィキボヤージュ – 世界各地のトラベル情報ガイド。
- メディアウィキ – ウィキメディアが運営するすべてのサイトを支えるオープンソースのソフトウェア。
Is Wikipedia, or the Wikimedia Foundation, affiliated with WikiLeaks?
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation have no affiliation with WikiLeaks. Although both use the term "wiki" in their name, they have always been completely separate and unaffiliated projects.
How is the Wikimedia Foundation funded?
The Wikimedia Foundation is funded primarily through donations from millions of individuals around the world. The average donation is about $15 USD, and we are grateful that so many people find value in Wikipedia and want to sustain its future. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts (please see our benefactors page for more information).
The Wikimedia Foundation has 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States. Donations made from other nations may also be tax deductible (see tax deductibility for more details). See Ways to Give for details on how to make a donation via credit or debit card, PayPal, Amazon and several other methods. If you have any questions, please contact us at donate@wikimedia.org.[1]
Why should I donate and where does my money go?
Over the past 20 years, Wikipedia has become a trusted source of information that millions of people rely on every day. With more than 6,700 pageviews every second and more than 350 edits a minute, Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites in the world, and the only major website run by a nonprofit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation.
Unlike other top websites, Wikipedia is not funded through advertising, nor does it rely on selling data about users for profit. Instead, Wikipedia is supported by its readers - people who find value in Wikipedia and want to continue to support its success, with the average donation being about $15 USD. This financial model enables Wikipedia to remain neutral, trusted, and free from commercial interests.
Here are just some of the ways we use donations to sustain Wikipedia and free knowledge:
- Providing top-notch technical infrastructure for a global website - To meet the needs of Wikipedia readers around the world, we operate an international technology infrastructure comparable to the world’s largest commercial websites. This includes hosting costs like keeping our servers running, as well as significant, ongoing engineering work to make sure Wikipedia is reliable, secure, loads quickly, and protects your privacy.
- Ensuring you can access Wikipedia in every language on every device - Donations also allow us to dedicate engineering resources to ensure that you can access Wikipedia in your preferred language, on your preferred device, no matter where you are in the world — from a dial-up modem to a brand new smartphone. Most major websites support an average of 50-100 languages — Wikipedia supports roughly 300 languages, a number that grows every year. When you break it down, we have about one employee for every four million monthly readers of Wikipedia.
- Supporting community-led projects to increase access to trusted information - We collaborate with Wikipedia volunteers around the globe to support their ideas and help them bring more free knowledge to the world. Every year, about 10% of our budget is specifically dedicated to supporting community projects that enrich, grow, and improve knowledge on Wikipedia.
- Defending and protecting free knowledge around the world - The Wikimedia Foundation’s policy and legal efforts help ensure that everyone has the right to access, share, and create knowledge, while defending our volunteers from threat of reprisal, and upholding our commitment to free expression and open knowledge. We advocate for free licenses and open source software and work to make sure that copyright laws are built and reformed so that people can share and use knowledge more broadly. We also fight against censorship and protect the right of everyone to speak and learn freely. Support for this work is vital to giving users everywhere equal access to Wikimedia projects.
Wikipedia’s fundraising requests seem urgent, despite the Wikimedia Foundation’s sizable reserve. Why do you need additional funding?
We are fortunate to have a reserve. These are not funds that we use on a day-to-day basis; they can only be accessed in exceptional circumstances, such as an economic crisis. Wikipedia and its projects are critical resources that the world relies on daily. Our reserve funds are intended to ensure that we can remain sustainable even if the worst eventuality occurs. Our operating budget and annual plan are developed through an open, transparent process, subject to feedback from Wikipedia volunteers and Board approval. The details of our budget and plan are always available to the public for further review.
Staff compensation is part of your operating costs. Can you explain how this is determined?
Altogether more than 250 people work on engineering and product at the Wikimedia Foundation, handling technology infrastructure for more than 20 billion monthly pageviews. Compared to most major websites, we do a lot with a little. Additionally, approximately 100 staff work on our community support and grantmaking; partnerships with global organizations to make knowledge more freely available; and legal and policy work that helps advocate for copyright reform, prevent censorship and uphold free expression, and ensure that privacy and security policies in countries everywhere protect our readers and editors.
We know that salaries vary across the world and we hire in very competitive markets. At the same time, we are a non-profit. As such, we make an effort to be fair, adjusting for inflation and income inequality, while providing equitable compensation to all.
How can I donate?
There are several ways you can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikipedia and free knowledge. The most common are using any major credit or debit card (VISA, Mastercard, Discover or American Express), using PayPal, via bank transfer, and via Amazon. For other ways to contribute, including via an automatic monthly gift, check or money order and payroll deduction, please visit our Ways to Give page. Many currencies are accepted.
What is your donor privacy policy?
We are committed to protecting the privacy rights of our supporters and will never sell, trade, or rent your nonpublic personal information. Please see our Donor privacy policy for full details.
Are my donations tax deductible?
Some donations to the Wikimedia Foundation may benefit from tax deductible status. Please visit our tax deductibility page to learn more.
What is your refund policy?
If for any reason you wish to have your donation refunded, please contact us via email at donate@wikimedia.org[1] and include the following information:
- Full name of donor
- Date of donation — All refund requests must be made within 90 days of donation
- Amount donated
- Payment method used — Do not include credit card numbers in your email
- Country of origin
- Reason for the refund
All refunds will be processed as quickly as possible, but processing times may vary depending on the payment method. Please note: Some payment methods may not support refunds or require refunds to be made through the payment method (card) utilized, prompting additional information to process your refund.
Why am I seeing fundraising banners on Wikipedia even though I have already donated recently?
Donation banners are designed to show to donors that have enabled cookies on their browser, and to hide after the banner is shown a few times or after a donation. Hiding, however, depends upon a cookie that we insert in the browser. Banner hiding won't work if you clear your browser's cache, delete cookies, or change browsers or computers.
There are several options available to you to hide the fundraising banners in the future:
- If you click the X or Close button on a banner, it will hide for one week. Please note this behavior does not apply to the first banner you see, but every banner thereafter.
- If you return to the 'Thank You' page it will give the cookie a chance to reinsert. If you read Wikipedia on multiple devices, please visit this page on each of them to suppress the banners.
- You can also create an account on Wikipedia - banners are not typically shown to users who log-in to Wikipedia accounts. More information on creating an account can be found here.
Why have I received a fundraising email even though I have already donated recently?
If you have received a fundraising email even though you donated recently, this generally is for one of several reasons:
- We have more than one email address for you in our records;
- You donated within a day before our emails were sent: the scan we use to filter out recent donors is unable to catch donations made the day before the email send;
- You donated by either a method that is slower to reach our system, like a check or a bank transfer, or a method that we receive in aggregate (without your email address), like PayPal Giving Fund, Amazon Smile, or Humble Bundle.
If you would like to unsubscribe an email address, you can click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the fundraising email, or send an unsubscribe request to donate@wikimedia.org.[1] We generally send fundraising emails around a year after your most recent donation. We send a very low number of emails to donors, relative to other nonprofit organizations. If you donate in response to a fundraising email, we will not send you donation request emails again until around the same time the next year.
Why are there no ads on Wikipedia?
We are not considering advertising as a source of revenue. We do not believe that advertising belongs in a project devoted to free, reliable, and neutral knowledge. Introducing commercial interests could jeopardize Wikipedia’s reliability as a neutral source of information.
We are not against online advertising, nor are we against other organizations that host ads. We just know ads are not appropriate in a project devoted to education and knowledge – and especially one that strives for balance and neutrality.
Where can I find more financial information?
The Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Report covers the previous fiscal year. The report shares some of the voices of the hundreds of thousands of people who make the Wikimedia movement possible.
The Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan describes our budget for the current fiscal year. It contains a summary of our strategic goals as an organization, financial details on spending and revenue, and detailed explanations and risk analysis.
What is the Wikimedia Endowment?
The Wikimedia Endowment was created in 2016 to serve as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. Donations to the Wikimedia Endowment are held in a separate fund and invested to grow over time. The Endowment fund is managed by Tides Foundation and overseen by an independent Advisory Board. Once the fund reaches its initial fundraising goal, Endowment income will be distributed to provide critical funding to Wikipedia and its sister projects, providing security, confidence and trust in Wikipedia’s offerings and mission for years to come. You can learn more about the Wikimedia Endowment at wikimediaendowment.org.
What are the plans for Wikimedia's future? Where are you going?
At the beginning of 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a global discussion to define the future of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement by the year 2030. We call it Wikimedia 2030. Throughout the process, we asked ourselves questions like, where might we want Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia movement, to go next? What opportunities and challenges lie ahead of us? What trends in technology, education, information, and access will shape our future?
Based on this discussion and our research, we are uniting around a direction that will help us build a more sustainable, resilient, and engaged movement that anyone who shares our vision can join. We will adapt to the shifting trends in technology, to ensure we meet the needs of our users and continue to provide reliable, transparent, and neutral information. We will invite new voices to join us and ensure that anyone who wants to share knowledge on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites can do so. And we will advocate for the policies and values that have allowed Wikipedia and its sister sites to thrive. This direction asks us to be bold and experiment in the future, as we did in the past, and it remains rooted in our mission of free knowledge for all.
To read more about Wikimedia 2030 and the direction for our future, please visit 2030.wikimedia.org.
How can I participate in Wikimedia?
Firstly, thank you for your interest in supporting Wikipedia! We understand that not everyone will be able to donate, and that’s okay. Wikipedia will always be free for everyone, and there are several ways that you can contribute to Wikipedia beyond making a donation.
- You can read and use Wikipedia as your source of trustworthy information across more than 300 languages.
- You can make an edit on Wikipedia - if you want to fix a mistake on an article or add a citation to a trusted source, please do so! This guide is helpful for getting started on your first edit.
- Are you a photographer? Consider sharing your photos for anyone to reuse on Wikimedia Commons, which powers many of the images you see on Wikipedia articles. Learn more about how to upload photos here.
- You can follow Wikipedia and Wikimedia on social media and share stories that are meaningful to you. Check out @Wikimedia on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and @Wikipedia on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
- Are you a developer? You can contribute code to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites. This guide for new developers is a helpful place to get started.
How can I contact the Wikimedia Foundation?
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us. For donation questions, please email donate@wikimedia.org.[1]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Due to the volume of inquiries we receive, we use Zendesk as a donor response platform. By emailing donate@wikimedia.org, you understand that your information will be processed by the Zendesk Group in accordance with Zendesk’s terms. Users from the following countries should consult Section A of Zendesk’s privacy policy for more information about Zendesk’s country-specific practices: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore.