Press releases/One Laptop Per Child Includes Wikipedia on $100 Laptops

Subset of Online Encyclopedia to be Available in Static Version to Children and Teachers in Developing World
Aug. 4, 2006--The Wikimedia Foundation, the international non-profit organization dedicated to the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, announced today that the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association has chosen to load a snapshot of select Wikipedia articles onto the laptops it is developing. OLPC is an MIT-based project established to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and the opportunity to explore, experiment and express themselves. The announcement took place at Wikimania 2006, a three-day conference focusing on Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the use of wikis to organize knowledge. Wikipedia is among the first content to be featured in OLPC laptops.

"We are very pleased to have our content featured on the OLPC laptops," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. "OLPC's mission goes hand in hand with our goal of distributing encyclopedic knowledge, free of charge, to every person in the world. Not everybody in the world has access to a broadband connection. This is exactly the type of project that advances Wikipedia's core mission."

Wikipedia is a unique, dynamic way for kids to learn because children can absorb a vast sphere of information, and also add their own voice and experience to the mix. The wiki is an ideal medium in which to stimulate intellectual development and foster creativity.

About One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection.

OLPC is based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital. The founding corporate members are Nortel Networks, Google, News Corporation, AMD, Red Hat, Brightstar, Marvell, eBay, Quanta Computer, Chi Mei and 3M.

About Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. Wikimedia operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects anywhere, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites in the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage and develop infrastructure to support these projects, and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. Wikimedia has local chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Serbia, and Switzerland. Most of the Foundation's operations are funded by personal donations.

Contacts
The Wikimedia Foundation press@undefinedwikimedia.org or One Laptop per Child Nia Lewis nia@undefinedlaptop.org or Schwartz Communications, Inc. Robert Skinner or John Moran, 781-684-0770 wikipedia@undefinedschwartz-pr.com