Wikipedia Receives $500,000, €370,000 from Google's Sergey Brin and His Wife

Wikipedia has kicked off its yearly fund raising campaign in which it urges readers to donate a small sum to keep the site going for another year. The campaign started rather well, especially since Wikimedia, the foundation that runs Wikipedia and its sister sites, got $500,000, €370,000 right of the bat from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation.

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation was created, as the name would suggest, by Google's Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, who cofounded the rather interesting genomics company.

"This grant is an important endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation and its work, and I hope it will send a signal as we kick off our annual fundraising campaign this week," Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said.

"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. I am very grateful to Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki for supporting what we do," she added.

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation has provided grants to several scientific and research initiatives. For example, it donated the same amount as now to the X Prize Foundation, in 2009, but also to Creative Commons.

Its biggest contribution though, by far, is to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's disease research.

Earlier this year Brin Wojcicki Foundation issued a challenge saying it would match any donation to the foundation for a total of up to $50 million, €37 million.

The challenge runs until the end of 2012 and if the target is met, the Michael J. Fox Foundation will have raised $130 million, €96.2 million at that point.

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, the money should provide a nice jump start, but the site needs a lot more than that to reach its goals. And, while big donations like this are welcomed and generate headlines, Wikipedia really depends on small donations from every day users.