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

[Screamer]

Sue Gardner wrote:
> 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
>   
Excellent. :)

Jon
./scream