One of the latest Internet memes is to make fun of Wikipedia’s personal appeals — especially the ones from Jimmy Wales and Susan Hewitt, who just has to be the high priestess in a hippie commune. The idea is to, in an ironic twist, use Wikipedia to generate captions for the pictures of the appellants, and therefore make fun of itself. Kinda like a bully uses a kid’s own hand to slap the kid while asking “why are you hitting yourself?”.
If you need context about all this, a few weeks ago, Wikipedia started putting up ‘personal appeal’ banners from Wikipedian heavyweights, asking for donations.
A personal appeal on Wikipedia
Most people would rather deal with advertisements than being guilted into donating, but Wikipedia doesn’t believe in advertising — perhaps rightly so. And believe it or not, they actually keep data on how successful their various pledge drives are. It being Wikipedia, all that data is available on the parent company’s website, and apparently, the personal appeals are very successful.
From FAIL Blog