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Vinod Khosla and his wife donated $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation

 

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.

 

 

 

 


Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems