Nor does off-wiki collaboration require that a formal
entity be in
existence. Off-wiki activities -- whether social meetups or more formal
outreach efforts to GLAM institutions and elsewhere -- are no less
effective
for being organized by loose groups of interested participants. So long
as
there is no need to handle substantial funds -- and
how much of
Wikimedia
contributors' typical work requires such? -- the
lack of a legally
constituted organization matters little.
But to take this one step further, let us assume -- for the sake of
argument
-- that the activities of the contributor community _do_ require the
existence of a dedicated legal entity in a particular jurisdiction. One
could, potentially, construct a scenario where this is the case; for
example, someone wishes to donate a set of copyrighted works, and
prefers
that an organization subject to local laws be
responsible for handling
the
process. Even in this case, however, there is no
requirement that the
legal
entity be a "chapter" of the Wikimedia Foundation -- or, to be more
precise,
that the entity have in place a particular sort of trademark usage
agreement
with the WMF. I can think of no conceivable need that could be filled
by a
local entity holding rights to (non-commercial!) use
of Wikimedia
trademarks
but could not be filled just as well by a local entity identical in
every
way save for the lack of such access to said
trademarks.
And just to add to the argument, the projects are divided by language, and
not by jurisdiction. Whereas in many cases it may be unimportant (for
instance, we can safely assume that most of the activbities of the Swedish
chapter are more related to Swedish-language projects, and if there is any
chapter which "caters" to Swedisg-language projects it is the Swedish
chapter), this is not correct for most of the major languages (English,
French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian ...)
Cheers
Yaroslav