About AutoWiki

What we do
AutoWiki is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to establish a global online database with digital archives of individual cars to complete and preserve their history and to enlarge the transparancy of the car market.
To support this mission, we provide the internet platform ‘AutoWiki’ (website ‘AutoWiki.org’) and an organizational framework to manage and facilitate the collection, storage and presentation of data.
We strive to make and keep all informational content provided by our contributors available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
All individual car information in the database is provided and monitored by our users, so called ‘contributors’.
Together with our contributors from all over the world we form the AutoWiki community and we are building the largest car database in the world. 
Generally at AutoWiki, we do not monitor, edit or delete content ourselves. This means that editorial control is in the hands of you and your fellow users, who create and manage the content. We merely host this content. There are some exceptions in order to make our services easier for you, such as providing general information about car manufacturers and car models and we facilitate importing datafiles from our contributors to the database.

Who we are
AutoWiki Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded by Dutch car enthusiast Lodewijk Beijst and is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The organisation is managed by the Foundation Board and is advised by the Board of Advisors.
AutoWiki operates with non-paid volunteers, including the board members.
The development of the AutoWiki platform and operating costs are financed with donations from car enthusiasts.

Foundation Board
Lodewijk Beijst (chairman)
Secretary (appointed shortly)
Treasurer (appointed shortly)

Board of Advisors
Members with specific knowledge about: cars/ car makes, IT, finance, marketing, legal matters/ copyright etc.
To be installed in 2022/2023

Head moderator
Alexander den Hartog

Moderators
Contributors with specific knowledge about car makes and/ or models and/ or cars are asked to become moderator. Moderators streamline information added by contributors.
Moderators will appointed from november 2022.

Founding donators
AutoWiki would not exits without the founding donators who made it possible to build the AutoWiki platform. 
On behalf of the car world eternal thanks go to:
[First + last name donator (Company)]
[Anonymous]

History
After the death of his father in 2018 Lodewijk Beijst felt the urge to digitized the family archive with old family photos, films and documents. While scanning and organizing all documents with 130 years of history, he came up with the idea to do this for individual cars as well. He knew from his own experience how nice it is to have archives of cars, but also that such archives sometimes get lost. Eternal shame for future owners. 
Strengthened by all the enthusiastic reactions to his idea to 'build an internet platform with digital archives of individual cars', he started to develop a plan. When he thought about a name 'AutoWiki came up and to his surprise the URL www.autowiki.org was still available. 

In the following years the idea evolved and in 2021 the time was right to start building the platform. Lodewijk selected a Dutch/Nepalese IT company based in Kathmandu to build it and in September 2021 the start was a fact.
Beta version 1.0 of the platform was launched on 29th of June 2022. This beta version was mostly a functional platform consisting of a website and database. Most attention was paid to the basic functions and the back end. In the following months the platform was tested and improved, leading to beta version 1.1 in October 2022.
The second phase of the construction of the website has started in November 2022. In this phase extra features will be added to the platform and the focus will then be on professionalizing and optimizing the platform. In addition, the database will be filled by acquired databases and by links with externa databases. This phase is expected to last 16 months until February 2024.