My apologies if this has been suggested before.. but it seems like an interesting concept.. The issues: 1) The Foundation needs a steady source of income to support it's operation. Unobtrusive advertising could provide this sort of income, but many people object to any sort of advertising on WMF wikis. 2) Wikipedia (particularly en.wp) is a prime target for both commercial links and fancruft links, due to it's high ranking in search engines and the amount of traffic a link on a Wikipedia page can generate for a linked site. While a portion of these links are clearly commercial spam or self-promotion(coi), many are in a grey area with regard to both WP:SPAM and WP:EL criteria and they were probably posted with benign or benevolent intentions. The concept: 1) Create a WMF controlled wiki, to be used only to host 'external links'. (for the purpose of discussion, we'll call this 'linkswiki') With this concept, the criteria defined in WP:SPAM and WP:EL still apply, we may choose to relax certain aspects of the criteria a bit for linkswiki based links, but we wouldn't start allowing everything that gets posted. Then modify the link policy to something like "only 'official sites' and references/sources allowed on the main wiki article pages" (or some variation of more restrictive criteria that people can agree upon), all other 'external links' would be either posted directly to linkswiki or moved there via bot on a continuous basis. Each encyclopedia page would have an 'external link' to a corresponding page on the linkswiki. {insert a healthy amount of tech wizardry and creative thinking here to maintain the linkswiki directory and make it more useful to our users, this also requires a functioning SingleUserLogin to be practical. } 2) Enable a modest amount of unobtrusive Google ads (or similar) on linkswiki. If initial funding is needed to establish the infrastructure for linkswiki, we could consider a partnership with a for-profit - they provide startup funding in exchange for a percentage of the advertising income for a specified period of time. The end results: Users who click from the encyclopedia page to the linkswiki directory get what they expect: links to related things - some provided by users, others provided by advertising. There are far fewer linkfarms on encyclopedia pages, and the Foundation gets a steady source of income. Obviously, this is a very raw concept.. but I'm interested in hearing what folks think.. -- Best regards, Versageek