Founding principles

The Wikimedia projects as a community have certain foundation issues that are essentially beyond debate. People who strongly disagree with them sometimes end up leaving the project:

1. NPOV as the guiding editorial principle
2. Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering
3. The "wiki process" as the final authority on content
4. Copyleft licensing of content; in practice, GFDL (working on changes via GFDL 2.0)
5. Jimbo Wales as ultimate authority on any matter (this is changing; see Arbitration Committee, Board)

Several other projects are notable in their use of different principles. For example, h2g2 and some other collaborative projects have editorial boards that review content. Fred Bauder's fork Wikinfo project uses a sympathetic point of view rather than NPOV.

The presence of these foundation issues is, on the one hand, one of the strengths of the existing community, and on the other, one of the factors that has led to charges of cabalism.