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Open-Source Software Specialist Selected as Executive Director of Wikipedia

Lila Tretikov, left, will succeed Sue Gardner at the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent.Credit...Victor Grigas/Wikimedia Foundation

The foundation that runs Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has named a new executive director, Lila Tretikov, a software engineer in Silicon Valley.

Ms. Tretikov, 36, recently served as chief product officer at SugarCRM, a software company. She has a background in large-scale Internet projects as well as the open-source software movement — the collaborative process for creating computer programs, including the one that runs Wikipedia. But as she confessed to staff members at the foundation’s San Francisco offices on Thursday, she lacked one seemingly crucial qualification for her new post: She isn’t a Wikipedia contributor.

Speaking at a meeting streamed on YouTube, she promised to change that. “It is important to understand your users and you must be one of them,” she said.

Wikimedia meeting.

Born in the former Soviet Union, Ms. Tretikov arrived in New York by herself as a teenager and made her way to the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied computer science and design. In 1999, she started at Sun Microsystems and has been working in the technology industry ever since.

The foundation, which is known as the Wikimedia Foundation because it runs a range of collaborative projects in addition to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, spent more than a year looking for a successor to its current executive director, Sue Gardner.

Ms. Gardner, who joined the foundation in 2007, was a journalist at the Canadian Broadcasting Company, directing its website and online news outlets. At the time, Wikipedia was based in Florida, with a full-time staff of seven.

Today, Wikipedia has more than 200 employees, Silicon Valley offices and an operating budget of $35.7 million in the financial year ended June 30, 2013, with donations of more than $50 million in that period, according to the foundation. Unlike nearly every other large-scale online project, Wikipedia has no advertising.

There have been concerns among Wikipedia contributors and advocates that its period of growth has ended, whether among people who come to read or edit the articles. Even so, the site draws nearly 500 million unique visitors each month to encyclopedias in more than 250 languages; the English-language Wikipedia has more than four million articles.

Lately, a team of software engineers has been focusing on improving the mobile experience for Wikipedia users.

The selection of another woman to run the Wikimedia Foundation speaks to one of Ms. Gardner’s concerns about Wikipedia — the lack of diversity among the volunteers who edit and administer the project, whether by ethnic or geographic background or gender. By some counts, the percentage of women editors is less than 15 percent.

“Increasing diversity is very important,” Ms. Tretikov said. “Our mission is all about bringing knowledge to everyone — if some are left out, that is not everyone.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Open-Source Software Specialist Selected as Executive Director of Wikipedia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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