By Joan Bennett

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation, started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, awarded a $500,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and its sister sites. The Brin Wojcicki Foundation has funded such organizations as the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which is researching a cure for Parkinson’s disease. The principals of the Brin Wojcicki Foundation are Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google in 1997, and Anne Wojcicki, who co-founded 23andMe, a personal genetics company.

Sue Gardner (Executive director, Wikimedia Foundation): This is how Wikipedia works: people use it, they like it, and so they help pay for it, to keep it freely available for themselves and for everyone around the world.

The Wikimedia projects currently reach more than 477 million unique visitors around the world every month (comScore, October 2011), making Wikipedia the fifth most-popular web site in the world. The Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its 8th annual fundraiser on November 16, 2011.

Google also happens to have a Wikipedia-ish service called Knol, but the company does not really seem serious to promote it (no Google+ integration, among other things).