Stars of the Internet: JimboPedia

Mercy me, is it that time of year already? With the end of 2008 fast approaching, many of us get introspective. We think back to all the good times, revive our regrets and try to figure out how to be better people in the coming year. For Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales the New Year is a time for reflection, specifically about how his remarkably shady, stupendously public and utterly idiotic business plan could possibly be hemorraging money yet again.

As an organization, The Wikimedia Foundation costs several million dollars a year to run. Thanks to a lack of advertising or, ya know, a method of actually producing funds, this increasingly unwieldy behemoth is in dire straits. (<-- I'm sorry)

That's why Jimbo "I broke up with my insane girlfriend via my own wikipedia page" Wales has issued this overwrought plea for donations to his wildly popular but financially insolvent organization. Much to the chagrin of the thinking world, Jimbo's Wikiwhine is just two million Wikidollars away from Wikisalvation. This means that a bunch of people around the world have given more than four million of their real dollars to Wales just so he can keep making a living off of the hard work of hundreds of thousands of unpaid content generators.

Seeing as a lot of Wikimedia's costs go to bandwidth, maybe they could cut their losses by doing the unthinkable- Actually making their sites reputable sources of useful information. Think of how much bandwidth Wales would save every month just by eliminating every article related to all things Dragonball and Sonic the Hedgehog. As much as the world needs a log of a dozen Asperger's cases going 20 rounds over the images on Wikipedia's "Anus" page, it shouldn't cost a certified Non-Profit Organization thousands of dollars a month to maintain it.

Not that it wouldn't be a wonderful thing if the world of Wiki disappeared. A lot of good has come from power vacuums in the past. When Alexander the Great died, the resulting disorder allowed Carthage and the Roman Republic to rise. Sure, if the Wikimedia Foundation collapses it'll destroy the college careers of thousands of American undergraduates, but the improvement to the infrastructure of the United States resulting from the massive influx of young laborers will raise the standard of living for us all.

Also, Internet encyclopedias that actually pay their writers, researchers and editors will finally get a foothold. I, for one, welcome our Imperial Google Masters and hope to power my personal hydroponic tomato farm with their revolutionary solar love generators.

As for James "my beard is worse than ten thousand Holocausts" Wales, maybe he can go on to host telethons on PBS. He already has a lot of practice guilting thousands of strangers into giving him money for absolutely nothing, just think of what he'll be able to do when he actually has a worthy cause behind him.

Amount of Time Likely to be Wasted: In a potentially infinite source of information, the potential for wasted time is limitless. However, you are less likely to lose hours of your life to Wikipedia if you have no interest in the minutia of various television programs or don't give a damn about how hairy the back end of the average woman is.

Likelihood to Result in Arrest in Real Life: Quite high, actually. They killed Socrates for corrupting the young and Wikipedia is nothing if not a machine powered by antisocial personality disorder and libel.

MCDR: Wikipedia is a chronic condition. It can never be entirely washed from one's mind or the society in which we live, but as long as one maintains a strict regimen of meaningful study and informed decision making, the symptoms can be minimized. Some meditation couldn't hurt, either.

Internet Depth by Preposition: If anyone is Of the Internet, Jimmy Wales most certainly is. His entire livelihood comes from the most quintessentially Internet-y thing to ever exist. His social life has become one with the Web and everyone who thinks highly of him at all exists almost primarily online. If the Internet had a corrupt, corpulent, lecherous king, Wales would be him.

*special thanks to Andy Ward for the image