On 1/14/07, Christopher Thieme cdthieme@gmail.com wrote:
As to other links in print sources. Whoever wrote up marketing materials with " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page " on it should be dragged into the street and shot, or at least fired because anyone in ad copy will tell you to state shorter URLs on such materials, or your target audience won't find it or (worse) they'll ignore it. Heck, I type en.wikipedia.org each time I get to Wikipedia, but I'm not most people. Most people don't think when looking at or responding to ads, written materials, etc. Any smart marketing/adcopy person would have told you to get put together materials saying " www.wikipedia.com "
Jimbo, if that's the case, fire the marketing department.
What marketing? When did wikipedia ever do marketing? Never! Marketing has never ever been a priority in any way since page hits are fairly irrelevant to the development of wikipedia since we're an ad-free non-profit (well, atleast not pagehits beyond a certain point needed to get contributors).
And by the way, are you seriously arguing that having the main page where it is has hurt wikipedias popularity? Are you freaking kidding me? We're in the top 10 most visited websites! Popularity is the least of our concerns.
If you think about decisions about wikipedia in terms of marketing, you're really not getting what wikipedia is.
--Oskar