Community. Mission. Those are the key words you hear over and over at the Wikimedia Foundation. The legal department, in-house clients and even outside counsel repeat them like mantras. And while general counsel Geoff Brigham says them as much as anyone, he does so with feeling. “They’re not empty words—they cannot be empty words,” he emphasizes, because Wikimedia’s community of writers, editors, photographers and other volunteers around the world are the engine that powers Wikipedia and the WMF’s other projects. “They’re the reason we’re here.”
To understand why we’ve chosen Wikimedia as one of this year’s Best Legal Departments, let’s begin with the WMF’s mission “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”
