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2018 Annual Report. The people behind free knowledge. The technology behind free knowledge. 2018 by the numbers. Financials and leadership. Our donors. At 50 million articles and counting, Wikipedia is the largest source of human knowledge ever created—but it isn't complete.
Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. [5] It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. In addition, the foundation hosts 14 other related ...
- $154.7 million (2022), $162.9 million (2021)
- Jimmy Wales
- June 20, 2003; 20 years ago, St. Petersburg, Florida, US
- Board-only
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation provides the essential infrastructure for free knowledge. We host Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, created, edited, and verified by volunteers around the world, as well as many other vital community projects. All of which is made possible thanks to donations from individuals like you. We welcome anyone who shares our vision….
2018 in film is an overview of events, including the highest-grossing films, award ceremonies, critics' lists of the best films of 2018, festivals, a list of films released, and notable deaths. Evaluation of the year Richard Brody of The New Yorker said, "2018 has been a banner year for movies, but you'd never know it from a trip to a local multiplex—or from a glimpse at the Oscarizables ...
- Features
- History
- IMDbPro
- Character Filmographies
- IMDb TV
- Content and Format
- Ancillary Features
- Litigation
- Birth Names Publication Policy
The title and talent pagesof IMDb are accessible to all users, but only registered and logged-in users can submit new material and suggest edits to existing entries. Most of the site's data has been provided by these volunteers. Registered users with a proven track record are able to add and make corrections to cast lists, credits, and some other d...
History before website
IMDb originated in 1990 with a Usenet posting entitled "Those Eyes", by the English film fan and computer programmer Col Needham,about actresses with beautiful eyes. Others with similar interests soon responded with additions or different lists of their own. Needham subsequently started an "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors List", and Andy Krieg took over "THE LIST" from Hank Driskill, which would later be renamed the "Actress List". Both lists had been restricted to people w...
On the web
The database had been expanded to include additional categories of filmmakers and other demographic material as well as trivia, biographies, and plot summaries. The movie ratings had been properly integrated with the list data, and a centralized email interface for querying the database had been created by Alan Jay. Later, in 1993, it moved onto the fledgling World Wide Web under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database. The database resided on the servers of the computer science departmen...
As an independent company
In 1996 IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd. Founder Col Needham became the primary owner. General revenue for site operations was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships.
Actors, crew, and industry executives can post their own resume and upload photos of themselves for a yearly membership fee to IMDbPro. IMDbPro can be accessed by anyone willing to pay the fee, paid annually, US$149.99. Membership enables a user to access the rank order of each industry personality, as well as agent contact information for any acto...
On October 2, 2007,[citation needed]character filmographies were added. Character entries are created from character listings in the main filmography database, and as such do not need any additional verification by IMDb staff. They have already been verified when they are added to the main filmography.
In January 2019, IMDb launched an ad-supported streaming service called Freedive, which included many titles from Sony Pictures. This was the company's second attempt at a streaming service, having launched a similar service in 2008 which was later discontinued.[citation needed]Due to international licensing restrictions, Freedive was available onl...
Data provided by subjects
In 2006, IMDb introduced its "Résumé Subscription Service", where an actor or crew member can post their résumé and upload photos for a yearly fee.IMDb résumé pages are kept on a sub-page of the regular entry about that person, with a regular entry automatically created for each résumé subscriber who does not already have one. As of 2012, Resume Services was included as part of an IMDbPro subscription and is no longer offered as a separate subscription service.
Copyright, vandalism and error issues
All volunteers who contribute content to the database technically retain copyright on their contributions, but the compilation of the content becomes the exclusive property of IMDb with the full right to copy, modify, and sublicense it, and they are verified before posting. Credit is not given on specific title or filmography pages to the contributor(s) who have provided information. Conversely, a credited text entry, such as a plot summary, may be corrected for content, grammar, sentence str...
Data format and access
IMDb does not provide an API for automated queries. However, most of the data can be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be extracted using the command-line interface tools provided. There is also a Java-based graphical user interface (GUI) application available that is able to process the compressed plain text files, which allows a search and a display of the information. This GUI application supports different languages, but the movie related data are in Englis...
User ratings of films
As one adjunct to data, the IMDb offers a rating scalethat allows users to rate films on a scale of one to ten. IMDb indicates that submitted ratings are filtered and weighted in various ways to produce a weighted mean that is displayed for each film, series, and so on. It states that filters are used to avoid ballot stuffing; the method is not described in detail to avoid attempts to circumvent it. In fact, it sometimes produces an extreme difference between the weighted average and the arit...
Reference view
IMDb originally used a more sidebar/list-based view on title pages. However, in 2010 the site updated pages to more free-flowing layouts, and offered logged-in users an "advanced view" site preference setting called "Combined view", or this could be done on an ad-hoc basis by simply adding /combined to the end of the URL (e.g. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2358891/combined), for users to choose should they prefer the older page view display method or to aid the editing of data. In 2017, some a...
Message boards
Beginning in 2001, the Internet Movie Database also maintained message boards for every title (excepting, as of 2013[update], TV episodes) and name entry, along with over 140 main boards. To post on the message boards a user needed to "authenticate" their account via cell phone, credit card, or by having been a recent customer of the parent company Amazon.com. Message boards expanded in recent years. The Soapbox started in 1999 as a general message board meant for debates on any subjects. The...
In 2011, in the case of Hoang v. Amazon.com, Inc., IMDb was sued by an anonymous actress for more than US$1,000,000 due to IMDb's revealing her age (40, at the time). The actress claimed that revealing her age could cause her to lose acting opportunities. Judge Marsha J. Pechman, a US district judge in Seattle, dismissed the lawsuit, saying the act...
IMDb had long maintained that it would keep all valid information, but changed that policy related to birth names on August 12, 2019. IMDb will now remove birth names that are not widely and publicly known, of persons who no longer use their birth names. This was done in response to pressure from LGBTQ groups against the publication of transgender ...
- English
- Amazon
- October 17, 1990; 32 years ago
- Box Office Mojo
Our proposed plan for 2017-2018 is a continuation of the Foundation’s work as described in the 2016-2018 interim strategic plan, in which we focus on Reach, Communities, and Knowledge. These were identified as areas that the Foundation is uniquely positioned to address, including readership and reach, volunteer retention and engagement, and ...
We share a commitment to free knowledge and work together with our community. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and our other free knowledge projects. We want to make it easier for everyone to share what they know. To do this, we keep Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites fast, reliable, and available to all.
