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Online Encyclopedia To Leave St. Petersburg For San Francisco

Published: Sep 26, 2007

TAMPA - The Tampa Bay area will soon lose perhaps its best-known technology superstar: Wikipedia.com.

The Wikimedia Foundation, operator of the globally known online encyclopedia Wikipedia, will move this winter from St. Petersburg to San Francisco to be closer to "like-minded" companies, the center of U.S. high technology and a better international airport, the company said.

A special Wikipedia adviser, Sue Gardner, wrote to local employees, saying, "Florida has been a very good home for us. But it's time to move. We need to be in a larger city that is more suited to our work" and close to world-class universities such as Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Wikipedia grew into the world's largest community-written encyclopedia, with more than 7 million entries in 143 languages.

The departure may sound like a disaster for the area's technology reputation, but the economic impact will likely be less enormous.

It was a historical "accident" that the company was even based in St. Petersburg in 2003, Gardner said. Founder Jimmy Wales happened to live in St. Petersburg when he started the nonprofit foundation that produced Wikipedia, and the organization always focused on its virtual, dispersed nature.

Wikipedia does not employ scores of people here. The main office has six full-time employees. The Web site's vast exposure and millions of articles are a product of thousands of volunteer users who contribute entries in real time on virtually every topic on earth.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which officially oversees Wikipedia, recently asked Gardner to study where the company should be based. The list of potential candidates eventually narrowed to Boston, London, New York, Washington and St. Petersburg.

In picking a new site, Wikimedia's leaders considered things such as air travel options and libel laws that apply to online media. San Francisco won out. The St. Petersburg office is expected to close in early 2008.

Even after the move, the Tampa Bay area will retain a Wikipedia presence. Wikipedia's largest of four computer server clusters is in downtown Tampa, and the organization is not considering moving those.

Reporter Carlos Moncada contributed to this report. Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.


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