They really have to do better than the current "please give!" campaign (I have!), in which a series of real-life photos go in the upper left corner of the search page, above whatever name or concept you are looking for. Eg just now:
And:
Or:
More on this phenomenon from TechCrunch. Seriously, if this were the Early Bird Dinner Club site, you could understand the inattention to page layout. But Wikipedia? In any case, please consider donating, as I have. Thanks to TMF in SF for the prompt. __ UPDATE: Via TechCrunch, news that Wikipedia views this photo-roulette as serendipitous feature rather than bug. It turns out that more people make donations when the pictures are placed this way. Brian Glucroft points out that for languages written right-to-left, like Hebrew, Wikipedia switches the photo placement to achieve the same effect.
And it turns out that The Oatmeal has done a much less polite version of my montage above.
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James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.
