A Personal Appeal To Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales

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Wikipedia's decision to left-align Wales' picture has been tremendously effective at spreading the news that Wikipedia is running a funding drive.<p>So far I've read about here, the Register, Reddit, Techcrunch and a couple of other blogs who couldn't help pointing out the hilarity.<p>Money <i>could</i> buy that amount of publicity, but by gum it would be expensive. Congratulations to all involved.

"especially the 20 bucks I’m about to throw at you". This is very cheap on the writer's part. I agree, Jimmy Wales' face showing up is super irritating, but I personally did not like the tone.

Sorry Techcrunch, The Oatmeal already beat you to the joke:<p><a href="http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales" rel="nofollow">http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales</a>

Usability and design considerations aside, I find it more worrying that this year's campaign seems to be entirely centered around him and that in general Wales is acting more as the face of Wikipedia than he used to. All that can lead to is making the project more vulnerable through personal critique on Wales, like happened with WikiLeaks/Assange.

After reddit submits, now HN article and more coverage this is transforming into an epic example of usability fail. I cannot think of any precedent or similar mistake.