Who is actually in charge of Wikipedia and its sister projects? The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), first introduced to you in Chapter 2, The World Gets a Free Encyclopedia, has taken on this role. The Foundation does not oversee any project content but instead owns the projects legally and provides a central resource to keep the projects' infrastructure, such as the web servers, up and running.

Because the Foundation staff is small for such an ambitious venture, most day-to-day decisions are still made by the community that has developed around each project. The wiki spirit of volunteering does not stop at the individual project level, however. Daily work on Foundation-level tasks is carried out by hundreds of people, from running elections to talking to the press to helping out with fundraising. Foundation volunteers generally come from individual wiki projects and use that background knowledge in their work. Perhaps they first contributed to Wikipedia, then fanned out to another project such as Wiktionary, and discovered they were interested in cross-project or cross-language issues. Much of the discussion between community members on Wikimedia's different projects occurs on the Meta-Wiki, which we'll describe later in this chapter. Its pages are referenced in the style [[m:Help]], where the interwiki symbol m stands for http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/. This is distinct from the Foundation's own wiki, at http://wikimediafoundation.org/; the interwiki code for the Foundation is wmf. We'll refer to pages on both of these wikis throughout this chapter.

This chapter describes the governance structure for the projects as a whole, how operational work gets done, and how to get involved. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikiversity in all their language versions together represent thousands of varied, individual wiki communities. A few broad policies apply to all the projects, but central control is mostly ad hoc; the Foundation is really a federation of projects and activities, bringing together everyone who wishes to help with cross-project work.