NRI Vinod Khosla and
his wife donated $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco, April 07, 2008
Suman Chhabra
NRI philanthropists Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Daisy Systems
and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, and
wife Neeru Khosla (innovators in educational outreach), donated
$500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization.
Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia and one of the 10
most popular web sites world-wide. It is written, edited and maintained
entirely by a global community of thousands of volunteers. The
Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff of 15, and
provides organizational support for Wikipedia and eight other
collaboratively-created information projects.Wikimedia has just
relocated to San Francisco area. The foundation promotes the 'growth,
development and distribution' of free, multilingual content. It
aims to provide the full content of these wiki-based projects
to the public free of charge. 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.
Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK12, a non-profit organization
supporting the worldwide creation of "flexbooks," collaborative,
open-source textbooks said, "Vinod and I are proud to help
Wikipedia, a valuable global educational resource and Wikipedia
proves that mass collaboration works, and that small investments
can reap extraordinary returns. We are happy to be a part of it."
Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation said,"We
are thrilled and very grateful- 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."
Last week, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving
$3 million over three years to the organization that runs Wikipedia.
This is good news for an organization that has been recently
criticized over its finances, particularly from those who say
founder Jimmy Wales may have played a little fast and loose with
the foundation's credit card when it came to personal expenses.
The foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, has strongly
denied the charges, arguing that Wales did nothing wrong.
