<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />[b]Wikipedia founder in town to launch site to fight homelessness[/b]
Tampa Tribune
TAMPA - The founder of Wikipedia will be back in Tampa Bay this week to help launch a new online project to fight ...

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It's going to be hosted at Wikia.com.

You'd think Jimbo would leave the banner ads off of at least this particular wikia, but no -- he'll make a dime even off the homeless.

How much does it cost to set up an independent domain and web hosting for 2-3 years? Maybe $200, $300 tops? If their county can't come up with that much to help 10,000 homeless people, I suspect they have bigger problems than the need for a "one-stop shop."

I can see why they wouldn't want to administer something like that themselves, since it might occasionally require them to check on things and maybe make a few corrections, but seriously - this Wikia subdomain will become completely moribund within 3-4 weeks, just like roughly 95 percent of the others. Nothing more than a crass publicity stunt.

So he gets free publicity in exchange for donating exactly nothing, since Wikia doesn't charge for sites on its service anyway.

The notion of using a publicly-editable wiki as an information exchange for local services is mindboggling. Even money says the site is being used to arrange tricks for hookers by the end of next year.

They should name that site after the public housing complex that Randian ubberman destroyed rather than let his noble work be used for the benefit of others.

No bet. That (and a venue for drug dealing) has been the fate of every other publicly funded accomodation for the homeless in past years, except in the few cases where somebody has been willing to pay for massive security and oversight. Which by definition does NOT happen on the net.

Which of the following will watched more carefully in a year: The Homeless Website; or Jimbo's BLP on WP?

Simply unbelievable. At this moment there are adds on the Tampa Bay Homeless Resource Wiki for; Clear internet service, Sprint 3G/4G modems, FingerHut and a slew of Vampire/Lady Gaga wikis.

Hey now, hey now.

Let's take it easy on Jimbo.

If there's one thing we must credit him on, he is an expert at setting up Wikia sites.

Founder???

Oh, Mr. Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanger, can you please clarify something?

You can also pay $25 to hear Jimbo speak at the grand opening.

Now, now, sometimes a typo is just a typo …

HO MESS

Not this time …

Jon

Looks like Jimbo is going to help the homeless by assisting the whole block!

What do Randites like Jimbo normally say about the homeless? Isn't it the usual "devil take the hindmost" principle? I wish more people would confront him about his views, instead of letting him constantly get away with this kind of absurd and exploitative hypocrisy.

That would be correct. You will find few philosophical positions more cruel and, dare i say it, Darwinian than Objectivism. He who makes it keeps it all, and he who can't must apparently starve to death in the gutter.

Sometimes I wonder if Rand was in favor of lining up all the mentally-handicapped and physically-handicapped people, and shooting them like unwanted animals.

(Which I find amusing, because Rand herself would have had serious problems living in a United States where her demented "philosophies" ruled all personal transactions. If everything were based on pure one-on-one capitalist haggling, she would likely have to pay large sums to some greedy SOB to pave her street, install sewers and water pipes, provide electric and telephone service, etc. All of which are government-regulated and often government-owned utilities. Precisely because they are regarded as essential services to support civilization, and would fail or become unavailable to most people if they were purely capitalistic in nature. Not to mention police, military, international diplomacy, international trade, the 1950s/60s Pentagon research spending that led to the complex semiconductors your computer is full of , etc.)

<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />[b]Wikipedia founder creates on-line source of help for Tampa Bay's homeless[/b]
Tampabay.com
TAMPA — Between stops in his globe-trotting life as an Internet mogul, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came to Ybor ...



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"Jimmy Wales called me a disgruntled former employee and all I got was this stupid website."

Mods... think this should be moved to the "Worth Discussing" thread already underway.

I don't know if the "disgruntled former employee" (D.W.) is homeless, but I know he was very nearly so about a year ago. It's an excellently witty point, Anthony.

FWIW, I have no evidence that Mr. Wool ever was actually homeless (just very poor and petitioning Obama for handouts). Though in my defense the site seems to be a resource for all types of poor people (I skimmed through it and one food bank requires you to prove residency by providing a utility bill - not sure what sense that makes, but anyway).

As with most things Wales does: good idea, terrible implementation.

He must have donated something. Julia Gorzka is "seriously on cloud 9" since his arrival.

This could be one of the worst logos I've ever seen:



Still, while Jimbo says the "purpose of the wiki is probably not to handle individual requests," if they can manage to steer these people in the right direction, they will have at least done something nice.

And they do have over a hundred listings, looks like - making it more active than many Wikia subdomains... We'll just have to see how long that lasts, I suppose.

It's worse than you imagine. Rand claimed that "nobody helped me" when she emigrated to the US, but the Barbara Brandon Bio of her, has her sitting in the kitchen of sponsors in the middle of the night pounding a typewriter, while they were upstairs with pillows over their heads.

Rand would later claim that charity is a marginal issue, but is appropriate if you do it out of wanting to help somebody because of the intrinsic value of their struggle, rather than anything base like sacrificing anything of yours for somebody you don't agree with. But the people who did help Rand didn't become Objectivists. They helped her out of the milk of human kindness. Of course, she never did quite understand that. In fact later, she apparently forgot the help.

But as we've noted, she personifies narcissism in philosophy. One gets the odd feeling (as I've said before) that Neitzsche (reminiscent of Rand in some ways) criticized traditional "Christian values" mainly to jerk chains, but otherwise didn't quite act the part, rather like Hume and HIS philosophy. In Rand's case you get the feeling that she actually believed that shit herself. Especially toward the end.

Looks like someone else equally forgets the help.

The site is nearly unusable with the vast number of advertisements plastered about;
http://tampabayhomeless.wikia.com/wiki/Sal...Social_Services
http://tampabayhomeless.wikia.com/wiki/Sho...or_the_Homeless

It looks decently readable to me, but then again I use AdBlock Plus, which blocked three or four items (forget which) on visit. Wikia wikis are pretty usable (if slow) when ABP is active.

Same here. Most commercial sites in general are hideously grimy with ads, and only become tolerable with Adblock or NoScript in Firefox.

Jimbo's Wikia is just following "industry standard practices".

Considering his unprecedented involvement with this particular Wikia, either Jimbo's worried that one day he'll join the ranks of the Tampa-area homeless so he's planning ahead, or he's bangin' one of the coordinators of the project.

Not many women can resist a man who builds a website for them. Even if it does look like crap both with and without AdBlock Plus. "It's the thought that counts."

Seriously, with or without the ads, it's crap. It's looks like a standard run of the mill "Made for Adsense" website. Reminds me of Wikipedia Review's Sarbanes-Oxley pages (which, hey, Greg, I'm not knocking you for having, I've personally made a bit of money off various scraped-content made-for-adsense websites, but you've gotta admit they look like crap).

Nice gift, though. We're often willing to overlook how hideous a gift is, if it shows a particular effort at obtaining our affection. "It's the thought that counts."

No offense taken. These pages were installed by the founder of Centiare.com, which was the origin of the Wikipedia Review-as-directory-not-as-paid-editing-service website. My sister and I have debated whether or not to remove them, but we figure until that day where at least 10% of publicly-traded companies are setting up their Wikipedia Review listing for themselves, the pages are doing little harm. I think the PR sting of suddenly losing 22,000 of our nearly 50,000 pages is too much damage to warrant the clean-up.

If I can't even get editors to take $15 to write five sentences about the consumer economy, I'm not going to lose sleep over sucky AdSense magnets.

This is funny since, as a Randroid, Wales opposes the use of public money to build housing to get people off the streets just as he opposed, in principle, the use of public funds to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

It looks like Wales also opposes the use of Tampa Bay Homeless Resource on Wikia server space to keep needy people in their homes and off the streets.



Also, this:



...warranted a one-year block from Jimbo.

Jimbo likes to keep his homeless shelter really tidy.

It goes further than that: Jimbo opposes private charitable efforts as well. Back in 2004, when the Southeast Asian earthquake/tsunami happened, he insisted that a Wikipedia banner directing users to charities that would help the victims had to be taken down. It's wrong to help disaster victims, you see.

Wikia Nswers is getting in on the action!



In other words, "wikis are efforts that require the least amount of personal support from me, the God-King"!

Yes, but ladies: Beware of gifters already wearing Trojans.

Jimbo's Wikia Nswers site, meanwhile, is giving out great advice, such as:



Maybe the Tampa Bay homeless could help themselves by giving out great answers on Wikia Nswers, which will build up their "edit points", which they can then potentially parlay into global speaking tour gigs, just like Jimbo's done?

I wonder what the null edit means in this context. Maybe she oversighted something?

The "1 revision" edit summary didn't make any sense to me either until I looked at the log for the page. How unexciting.

The Tampa Bay Homelessness Fighting Wikia Wiki is really rolling along. For example, in just the past two weeks, there have been five (5), count 'em -- FIVE -- content edits on article topics.

Way to go, Jimbo and your bevy of Tampa-based altruistic PR beauties!

http://juliagorzka.com/how-can-a-wiki-help-the-homeless/

Zero edits in the past 7 days.

The homelessness problem must be solved, I guess. Congratulations, Jimbo, on eradicating homelessness in the Tampa area!

I suppose that indirectly, he might have done just that - once the Tampa-area homeless folks realized how lame and ineffective the local efforts to deal with their situation are ("a wiki? WTF?"), they probably all hitch-hiked to Orlando or Jacksonville, where the local governments are probably doing things that might actually help them. Problem solved!