Second draft, taking into account many comments offered (thanks !)
What do you think ?
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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-licenced 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, 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 insure 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.
Independance
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 community is 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 community. We must listen and take into
account our communities in any decisions taken to achieve our mission.