Jimbo Makes Personal Appeal For Wikipedia.

In case you haven't heard, Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales is making a personal appeal for the Wikipedia. That means if you haven't given a simple dollar already and you're reading this - you should.

While I often try to add some value to posts, Jimmy's one paragraph hits a lot of this mess in the head quite clearly:

I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I’m doing this for the child in Africa who is going to use free textbooks and reference works produced by our community and find a solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him. But for this child, a website on the Internet is not enough; we need to find ways to get our work to people in a form they can actually use.

I don't know Jimmy, but I have corresponded with him a few times and I believe not only that this is a sincere reason for him doing it - it's also a sincere reason for you to do something. You. With the keyboard. Yes, you. No, not the person behind you. Right. Good. If you're willing to see funding used for $100 million dollar laptops, maybe you're willing to have actual content available to them.

And as far as the funding agencies out there who have largely ignored the Wikipedia - well, there's no excuse for funding all these academic papers when you could be contributing to something that demonstrates it works.

If everyone on the internet, using the internet, donated one dollar - well, that would be enough. I bet you spent more on alcohol than that tonight. ;-)