On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
No way!! Many people, me included, contribute to
wikipedia
because of a spirit of freedom/communist zeal/whatever that
would largely evaporate if wikipedia started serving ads. Even
a symbolic thing like the change from
wikipedia.com to
wikipedia.org was a big motivation for me. Anyway didn't Jimbo
promise us long back that there would *never* be ads on
wikipedia? :)
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!
Why don't we do the opposite: Have opt-in ads for logged in users. So that
way we'd only be showing ads to the people who specifically requested
them without alienating anyone else. Hopefully enough people will be happy
to have ads on to make it worthwhile (and profitable) for wikipedia.
Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran