About Foundation

WikiBilim Public Foundation — is a non profit  organization registered according to the Kazakhstan legislation and operates in Kazakhstan. WikiBilim PF was created in May 2011 in Almaty.

The mission of the organization is to promote online educational content in the kazakh language. Therefore Foundation promoting innovating content in education and intellectual hobbies  amongst  the young  generation of people.

In order to meet our own goals the Foundation is running the following projects:

• Promoting Kazakh Wikipedia in the society in order to attract more editors and improve quality of the articles that are published in  the Kazakh language.
• Promoting Creative Commons licenses to improve relations between authors and providers of intellectual property.
• Launching intellectual video portal in the Kazakh language.
• Launching an open and free online library of Kazakhstan.

Kazakh Wikipedia

Kazakh Wikipedia started in 2002, however the number of editors and articles were very low. In order to increase the attention of society and especially young generation of internet users Wikibilim started to administrate Kazakh Wikipedia.

Timeline of the Project

In May 2011 the initiative group of wikipedians launched a non-profit organization to run this project. After negotiating with Wikimedia Foundation Inc WikiBilim obtained permission to use Wikimedia Trademark for public campaigns in Kazakhstan.

During the press-conference on 16th of June 2011 Head of Samuryk-Kazyna National Foundation Mr. Timur Kulibayev announced their intention to support Kazakh Wikipedia and WikiBilim Public Foundation.  In order to increase quality of articles and the number of active editors Samuryk-Kazyna and Nokia Kazakhstan launched two wiki-contests. SMK granted 100 laptops to Wiki contest winners for 100 people who are to write 100 articles each within a given time-frame and a satisfactory level.  Nokia Kazakhstan granted 50 mobile phones to authors of featured articles. The contest is still running at present..

The Chief Editor of Kazakh National Encyclopedia Mr. Bauirzhan Zhakyp donated all paper based content of Kazakh encyclopedia, Encyclopedia for children, Nature of Kazakhstan and Writers of Kazakhstan to WikiBilim under the license of Creative Commons-BY-SA 3.0.

In July 2011 WikiBilim Foundation launched a summer internship program with International IT University in Almaty. During the internship first year students practiced to use open source codes, wiki mark-ups, editing article and referencing.

In 4-6 August 2011 WikiBilim Foundation took part on an Annual Wikimedia Conference Wikimania-2011 held in Haifa, Israel. During the Wikimania in Haifa WikiBilim Foundation was announced as Wikipedian of the Year for increasing the the number of editors from 4 to 232 and number of articles from 7000 to 78 000.

In November 2011 Kazakh Wikipedia reached the 100 000 article milestone. The Prime Minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan Mr. Karim Massimov announced his support to Kazakh Wikipedia and in particular WikiBilim..

Creative Commons

In September 2011 The WikiBilim Foundation team took part in CC Global Summit in Warsaw, Poland.

In December 2011 Creative Commons Headquarter announced WikiBilim Foundation as the affiliate organization in Kazakhstan.

In 2012 WikiBilim Foundation will be launching a public campaign to promote Creative Commons licenses. The purpose of this campaign is to attract websites to publish them under CC Licenses.

Open Library of Kazakhstan

In order to increase online educational content WikiBilim Foundation launched an online library of Kazakh Authors. Open Library of Kazakhstan will contain text, audio and video materials donated by authors under the Creative Commons licenses.

Currently there are more than 150 authors who have already signed an agreement to publish their work.

«Altyn Kyran» Charity Foundation sponsored the Audio chrestomathy of Kazakh literature in the school program.