Go to any Wikipedia page and you'll see a banner ad: "Please Read: A personal appeal from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales."   He wants you to send him $20 to keep Wikipedia free from advertising.  

How can an "avowed fan" of Ayn Rand ask for charity without being a hypocrite?

Case for:

Wales built something of value to society.
Wales is not compelling you to donate.
Wales is not interrupting normal Wikipedia operations to entreat you to donate (as NPR does).
Nobody has to use Wikipedia to gather information from the Internet.
The government does not control Wikipedia apart from the security and obscenity parameters universally applied.

Case against:

Wales made his product free so even bums like me can use it without paying him a cent.  An Ayn Rand no-no.  Bad example.
Wales lets the great unwashed contribute as opposed to the intellectual and cultural elites only.  Another Rand no-no.
There is no direct compulsion, but there is implied compulsion.  If you do not donate, Wikipedia might resort to advertising!
What the hell is wrong with advertising?  Wales' anti-advertising stance implies there is something sinister about the profit motive --
MAJOR AYN RAND NO-NO.

I use Wikipedia all the time.  It's very handy.  I find its platform facile and I like its democratic approach.  Of course, I would not rely on Wikipedia articles for formal research, though the cited sources at the end of each article are helpful pointers for researchers.  

What are your thoughts on this Ayn Rand fan asking for your hand-outs?
???

Screw him

Screw him


Okay, so I think Don Carlos is in the No camp on the Jimmy Wales charity drive!
;D

Wales made his product free so even bums like me can use it without paying him a cent.  An Ayn Rand no-no.  Bad example.
Wales lets the great unwashed contribute as opposed to the intellectual and cultural elites only.  Another Rand no-no.
There is no direct compulsion, but there is implied compulsion.  If you do not donate, Wikipedia might resort to advertising!
What the hell is wrong with advertising?  Wales' anti-advertising stance implies there is something sinister about the profit motive --
MAJOR AYN RAND NO-NO.

What are your thoughts on this Ayn Rand fan asking for your hand-outs? ???


(Rand had no idea that computers would eventually become so commonplace that they would bring about a world in which information, not things, would be simultaneously worth something and yet cost nothing to replicate, and so her system of values had no real concept for the open source movement.  Open source is quite literally like dropping a Star Trek replicator into a 1950s factory...)  Arguing in an intellecutal straitjacket is fun, I'll play!  

1) He made his product free so that it would get readers; a book unpublished is of no value to anyone.  And a world of uneducated consumers isn't in many people's best interests.  Bandwidth isn't free, but it's too cheap to meter.  A world of educated people is a world with more engineers, builders, artists, and other creators.  The more toys you can create, the more stuff you have to trade with your fellow toy-creators.  Everyone ends up with more toys!  (Your erroneous premise is that Wales is more productive in a world in which nobody has the tools to be productive.)

2) Many eyes make all bugs shallow; by making it free, he increases the number of readers.  If every reader is also a potential editor, he has the services of hundreds of thousands of editors, all working for free.  For example, I won't attempt to edit the article on quantum chromodynamics, but if someone mentions a video game character's history, and I know where there's a link to documentary evidence of that history, I'll plunk in an edit.  We are all probably elite about something, however trivial.  (Disclaimer: I take an inclusionist approach to Wikipedia.  Diskspace and bandwidth are cheaper than interminable flamewars over whether or not Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or Killer Klowns from Outer Space are worthy of inclusion in the species' body of knowledge.)  (Your erroneous premise is that you'll get a better product by hiring a hundred editors than by asking for a hundred thousand editors to volunteer a couple of minutes a day.  Yet we use the Wikipedia a lot more than we do the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Wikipedia is often more accurate.)

3) There is no direct compulsion.  So, no force is initiated.  End of story.  He can imply anything he wants, I still don't have to send him $20.  But since I have gotten more than $20 of value from Wikipedia over the years.  I'll either slip him a $20 and say "Thanks for providing me with more than $20 worth of value!", or I'll slip him a $20 and say "I'll bet this $20 enables you to provide more than $20 worth of value for me over the next few years."  (Your erroneous premise is that asking is the same as demanding, but most statists have trouble with that distinction, especially when tax time rolls around :)

4) If your goal is to compile the world's knowledge in an easily-accessed form, because you believe that a world of smart people with access to a common body of knowlege is going to produce a world full of smarter toybuilders and toybuyers, you're loathe to let an advertiser piggyback on it.  There's nothing wrong with advertising.  But if you're dependent on the advertiser, you're no longer in the business of compiling the world's knowledge for your own enlightened self-interest - you're in the business of compiling all the knowledge that doesn't contradict the superiority of Coke over Pepsi, and you're doing it so that Coke can sell more soda.  That might be in Coke's unenlightened self-interest - it might even be in your unenlightened self-interest.  But if cashing out for the quick buck isn't what you set out to do when you founded Wikipedia, and especially if it goes against your enlightened self-interest - you say "no".  (Your erroneous premise is that Wales was in it for the fast buck, or that Wales doesn't get a greater benefit from living in a world in which producers/consumers are better-educated.)

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Good, good, good, and good!  I like your answer.  Karma.

I'm not in it to demonize Mr. Wales.  I just chuckle a bit when I see a Randroid sticking his hand out.  It's sort of like seeing Pastor Bob at the strip bar.  
;D

I'm also trying to figure out who the Objectives do like -- Mr. Peikoff of the Ayn Rand Institute doesn't like either major party:

Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer , and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer , it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because "both are bad."

--Leonard Peikoff

I have to agree with him there -- but he doesn't like the Libertarians either -- not sure why -- and (obviously) not anybody from the Green or the socialistic tickets.  

He seems like a crotchety old purist...as did Ms. Rand by the end.  There's a great 1979 episode of the Phil Donahue Show on which Ayn appears disgusted with everybody.  I don't know why she agreed to appear on Donahue in the first place.  Sort of like Maxwell appearing on The O'Reilly Factor!  Maybe she didn't know what Donahue was all about.  She said herself, basically, this life is great and you should be happy with what's here for you now instead of waiting for some messiah...but she seemed cranky about life to me!

I have not seen an Objectivist spokesman who didn't act all twitchy and irritable.  I think it's because they despise the pie-in-the-sky idealism of religious/collectivist thought, but they fail Hume's Is-Ought Problem just as hard as Christianity or Marxism.  *

As the irreligious drunkard Christopher Hitchens points out, do we really need books on how to be selfish pricks?  

Objectivists often seem oblivious to irony as well.  One of their spokesmen, I forgot which, countered his opponent's George Orwell reference with: "Well, if you're going to get your political beliefs from some novel..."

Hoisted on his own Peikoff!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/02/buck.gif

* Disclaimer: I am a neophyte with cursory knowledge of philosophy.