On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

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On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

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Foundation is not a legal term

"Private foundation" is one, though, and it is one that is contrasted with "public charity".

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode26/usc_sec_26_00000509----000-.... http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=137894,00.html

Yeh, I think we'd have to look up more than that to actually clarify all this.

I'm not sure there's anything to clarify.  The author of that article was obviously referencing the IRS distinction of "private foundation" vs. "public charity", in which the WMF clearly fits under "public charity" (at least, according to their tax filings and determination letter they do, see for instance http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-April/016265.html).  If you asked anyone who is familiar with US tax law for tax-exempt organizations what the difference is "between a foundation and a charity", that's what they're going to think of.  However, I think it's nearly equally clear that the definitions of these terms in the US Code do not coincide exactly (or even very much at all) with common usage.

Furthermore, as far as I can tell, "public charity" is a term invented by (or at least popularized by) the IRS, which doesn't appear in the actual tax code.  It could just as well be "private foundation" vs. "public foundation", and in fact the term "public foundation" does have quite a fair bit of use.

Anyway, my purpose in pointing out that section of IRS code was to explain what the author was talking about.  I don't think it shows that the author was right.  In fact, I think the author was putting far too much emphasis on some relatively obscure portions of the Internal Revenue Code, instead of plain language meanings, on which the status of the WMF is much more ambiguous.  To the extent the phrases "foundation" and "charity" have gone astray, they have gone astray due to the non-plain-language definitions given by the Internal Revenue Code and the Internal Revenue Service.