Wikimedia

Wikimedia Foundation is a private tax-exempt corporation (IRS 501) in the US founded and mainly run by Jim Wales aka Jimbo.

It has no independent board, no legal charity status in any country, and seems to spend money it raises on providing hardware for mediawiki sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

Some claims have been made that part of the funds it raises is used to support development of the mediawiki software (which Consumerium R&D wiki is running on). According to Mediawiki developers these claims are not true and they are receiving no money or support from Wikimedia.

Many longstanding participants in the Wikipedia project have serious problems with the people and processes employed by the Foundation. As a volunteer organization, it probably has growing pains, and it's unclear if it will outgrow these, gain an independent board, or other attributes of a responsible nonprofit. Most of the criticisms have to do with wiki management problems on which there is little well-understood practice.

Wikimedia/Wikipedia's struggle to resolves its internal contradictions (multi-language project run by a GodKing who speaks and reads only English, claims of neutrality with no outreach or mediation mechanism other than a technology that itself puts a sysop power structure of mostly developed-world people in charge of content, inability to examine its own community point of view) will provide both good and bad examples for the Consumerium Governance Organization, which would do well to avoid all the pitfalls it is falling into. See 142.X.X.X/Tim_Starling for a starting list of these, and references to longstanding issues and potential solutions that 'Wikipedians' ignore and censor, mostly at Meta-Wikipedia, e.g. m:regime change.