[Foundation-l] Our values

[Florence Devouard]

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.