[Foundation-l] Optional advertisement on wikipedia

[Michael R. Irwin]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>I'd guess the open questions would be:
>
>1) How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF?
>  
>
Zero impact.  Nonprofit means that surplus revenue is not handed to 
private individuals as a return on investment.  The Wikimedia Foundation 
can funnel as much money as they and their contributors feel they are 
willing invest in the public good/purpose as per the 
charter/organization plan/etc. approved by the State of Florida.   I 
have been told that arrangements are in progress to select a CPA and get 
the first required audit completed.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of approximately 25 
billion dollars so given billy boy's and pals past performance in 
extracting revenue from captive or coerced markets it probably has an 
annual income from stock dividends or splits anywhere between 2.5 and 5 
billion dollars.

That revenue is government regulated and must be spent in accordance 
with the laws of the state, country or tax haven the foundation is setup 
within.   If you are interested you might be able to find an audit 
report for past years online somewhere.

>2) Will the advertising programs be okay with only showing the ads to
>some small fraction of our users?
>
Several potential problems occur to me:

1.  Back in the good ol days whenever the issue of revenue came up Jimmy 
always came forward as a generous sugar daddy with deep pockets.  The 
issue always went away.  I believe he made some committments regarding 
ads and ad revenue.   He also made some good points about the benefits 
of no distraction from the authentic information on an encyclopedia page.

He will probably take a bit of a credibility hit with the forkers he was 
discouraging if he now decides that advertising is necessary and ok.   
Certainly I will waste no opportunity to shout it from the housetops.

2.  Advertising revenue implies counting who and how may have seen the 
ads.   I am already rationing my use of google and other search engines 
which spy on me and which are required by law to secretly share the 
results of this spying with regulatory authorities and secret police.  
Further, most of the privacy statements  are long winded and weasally 
but eventually get around to some kind of sharing with affiliates, 
partners, consortium, multinational conglomerate pieces, etc. etc.

Probably the easiest way to implement this user choice is a fork.   
Answers.com currently supports itself by reporting Wikipedia data 
packaged with advertising.   There are others around the net.  Most of 
them do not provide identification information regarding who owns the 
revenue stream generated.  I sincerely hope they are not affiliated with 
any of our volunteers, employees or stacked Board members or affiliated 
assets.

An easy way to experiment would be for Wikia to turn on a fork using 
user choice as you suggest and find out what happens.

If this would be too potentially detrimental to our all powerful 
figurehead and beloved God King or the community ..... then some other 
volunteer, developer, profiteer, or entrepreneur could emulate 
answers.com using the methods you suggest and possibly get rich.

3.  Revenue sources are always applicable to discussion regarding fat 
cat biases built into information products.    The guys with the gold 
always want to make the rules ... and then change the rules when 
somebody starts to kick the shit out of them on their own playing field 
or even demand the dignity due a beast of burden diligently pursuing 
masters' programs given priority over personal responsibilities or 
inclinations.

This is somewhat similar to the debates we used to have over whether 
P'hds simply must have courtesies and preference due their long years of 
servitude in academia rather than justify their opinions with citations 
and actual data or arguments if Wikipedia were to attract any adequate 
expertise to prosper.   I wonder how he is doing with his for profit 
cable venture presenting P'hd'ed expertise freed from academia to the 
masses?

Who makes the rules around here?  The guy that controls the stacked 
Board controlling the nonprofit foundation paying for the centralized 
editing bandwidth, the advertisers with the gold, the P'hds with 
unsubstantiated opionions and no time to make their case piece meal with 
drooling slackjawed trolls or script kiddies experimenting with Turing 
Tests, the measily masses of volunteers who show up occasionally, or the 
enlightened readers/writers of the TINC list?

Regards,
lazyquasar