Does anyone care about Wikipedia's appeal?

For the past few days or so, Wikipedia has been running its version of a telethon: an appeal for people to donate money to the site—especially to build up its foreign language editions. I wish 'em all the luck in the world, but I'm wondering if the success of this appeal only lies in proving that no one wants to pay for content. So far, slightly under 4000 people have donated, out of a pool of visitors that's in the tens of millions. (According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the site had roughly 31 million visits last month domestically in both its work and home panels.) Meanwhile, as of this writing no one has actually viewed the YouTube upload of the appeal, which is also running on the Wikipedia site itself.

Good riddance, page views

Louis Hau at Forbes.com is asking if the page view is dead, prompted by Tuesday's announcement by Nielsen/NetRatings that it would stop ranking sites by the number of page views. If that surprises you, maybe you haven't been paying attention to your Web travels lately. With more and more content available to users without them having to jump through multiple pages, people in-the-online-know have been second-guessing the wisdom of relying on page views for some time now. Thus, NetRatings' decision to emphasize other metrics such as time spent and total visits to individual sites. It's somewhat amusing to read about this shift at Forbes.com, which has often gamed the page-view system by presenting content so that users have to click and click and click again. For instance, a current world-altering feature, "In Pictures: Top Spots to See a Model," asks readers to click at least ten times to get through the content. Let's hope Forbes.com ends this practice soon, though old habits die hard.