Well, Jimmy's troubles have hit the associated press, and trickled from there into places like BusinessWeek.

Erik Moller, Wikimedia's Deputy Director, defends Wales:

When he talks about bringing education to those who cannot afford it, he’s not just trying to impress. Anyone who spends 5 minutes with him will understand that this is his personal life goal.

He’s helped us connect with philanthropists here in the Bay Area — donations like the recent 500,000 dollars from the last fundraiser were only possible because of his outreach efforts. His international network of contacts has helped us to build our Advisory Board, really smart people who have supported us on many occasions.

...

Jimmy not only created an extraordinary project — he decided to base it on the principles of the open source / free software movement, and turned it over to a non-profit organization. This was, by no means, the obvious thing to do: Had events played out a little differently, Wikipedia would today be a dot-com with ads, probably a subsidiary of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.

I think the public is going to be pretty forgiving.

(By the way, Erik brings up advertising revenue and blog incentives. Since I'm not making any money off the google ads -- damn you, non-clicking tech-savvy audience -- I'm going to take them down.)