On Nov 21, 2003, at 00:25, Daniel Mayer wrote:
IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the
forseeable
future. I
think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone
may not
be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having
something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that
scenario an
added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no more
ads!
The last time this was suggested we lost most of the Spanish-language
contributors to an acrimonious fork.
If you want to set up your own Wikipedia mirror with ad banners and
send the money to the foundation, go for it; but the day there are
advertisements on the main Wikipedia site we'll lose a lot of people,
including me.
Our primary resource is people, not money; we'd be better off with not
enough cash donations from people who care (plus offers of technical
help and free hosting) than rolling in dough without people. One of the
benefits of the license model after all is that it explicitly allows
the content, and thus the project, to live on if the current host
folds.
To bring a little extra cash into the foundation without pissing a lot
of people off, we might look into merchandizing. An actual usable
CD-ROM version could sell at least some token copies (think in
particular of those folks in countries where internet access is largely
limited to pay-per-minute dial-up), and hey, who doesn't want a
Wikipedia T-shirt? :)
(Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia
coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)