[Foundation-l] [Announcement] Wikimedia Foundation Receives $500K Donation

[Sue Gardner]

More good news! Again, please join us in celebration :-)

Jay has either just put this out as a press release, or he will shortly.

------- Original Message --------
Subject: Khosla presser
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:55:18 -0400
From: Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: jwalsh at wikimedia.org
Organization: Wikimedia Foundation
To: Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>

*Wikimedia Foundation Receives $500K Donation*

Vinod and Neeru Khosla, innovators in educational outreach, provide 
financial support to the Wikimedia Foundation.

San Francisco, CA - March 24, 2008 – The Wikimedia Foundation, the 
non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, is delighted to announce it 
has received a $500,000 donation from philanthropists Vinod and Neeru 
Khosla.

"We are thrilled and very grateful," said Sue Gardner, Executive 
Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Vinod and Neeru share the 
Wikimedia Foundation's vision: a world in which every single human being 
can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Today, they have moved us 
closer to making that vision a reality."

"Vinod and I are proud to help Wikipedia, a valuable global educational 
resource," said Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK12, a non-profit 
organization supporting the worldwide creation of "flexbooks," 
collaborative, open-source textbooks. "Wikipedia proves that mass 
collaboration works, and that small investments can reap extraordinary 
returns. We are happy to be a part of it."

The gift comes at a critical time in the history of Wikimedia, which has 
just relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Bay Area technical 
talent, like-minded non-profit organizations, and educational and 
research institutions.

"Moving to San Francisco was an essential step in the maturing of the 
organization," said Gardner. "Now that we are here, and have built a 
great team of smart people, we're well-positioned to make significant 
progress."

Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia and one of the 10 most 
popular websites world-wide, is written, edited and maintained entirely 
by a global community of thousands of volunteers. It was founded in 2001 
by Jimmy Wales. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff 
of 15, and provides organizational support for Wikipedia and eight other 
collaboratively-created
information projects.

In coming years, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to launch outreach 
projects designed to encourage contributions to Wikipedia from targeted 
groups such as academics, speakers of small languages, people in 
developing nations and older people. It also plans to increase the 
distribution of material from Wikipedia and its other projects in 
non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to provide information for 
people who are not online.

About the Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization 
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of 
free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of its 
wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of 
the largest
collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including 
Wikipedia, one of the world's 10
most-visited websites.

For a full list of projects, visit
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects

All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed 
by volunteers using the MediaWiki software. Their content may be freely 
used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to 
the restrictions of that license.

More information

* CK12, Flex Books for every student <http://www.ck12.org/>
* Wikimania 2008 <http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org>
* Wikipedia Academies in South Africa, an example for Wikimedia outreach 
events <http://icommons.org/academies>

Press inquiries:

jwalsh at wikimedia.org
+1 415-839-6885

Regional press contacts in other languages can be found at

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room#Official_chapters
-- 
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org