My Failed Attempt At Making An Appeal For The Wikimedia Foundation

My Failed Attempt At Making An Appeal For The Wikimedia Foundation

Editor?s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him @jaltucher.
I wanted to write an appeal for the Wikimedia foundation. I?m going to be completely honest with you: the only reason I wanted to write it was for completely self-promotional and ego purposes. On almost every Google search, Wikipedia is the #1 or #2 result. It?s almost like Google is just a middleman to Wikipedia.
In my ideal world, for instance, you might search on ?head transplants? and then click on the Wikipedia page and see my face on the left hand side with something like, ?Click here to donate $5 to my favorite cause?.
Who is that? One would wonder. Why is he now talking to the entire world?  You might forget all about ?head transplants? and realize that far more valuable information was a click away if you would just listen to my appeal to humanity for the benefit of the Wikimedia foundation.
How amazing would that promotion be? All for me.  When you are promoting yourself you can?t think of just, ?how many SEO impressions can I get?? When the aliens invade 700 years after our apocalypse they won?t care about SEO impressions. They will care about my very personal appeal at the top of 700 million Wikipedia pages. What was this civilization like at it?s peak. Don?t worry, ?James Altucher? will tell you. He has an appeal.
Why did I want to promote myself? No reason. Just ego. Ask my therapist. I lacked loved as a child, blah blah blah.
And I figured: they had Jimmy Wales up there. They had some programmer for Wikimedia. They had some random editor. They had the inventor of wikis. So why not me? My daughters use Wikipedia to cheat on their homework every day. And if I ever get sick and they figure out how to hook up the spinal cords to the head I might very well end up with one of these head transplants thanks to what I learned on Wi