On 10/24/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/24/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Personally, I really dislike the idea of any advertising on Wikimedia. This makes a fool of [[WP:NPOV]], [[WP:COI]] and related policies and guidelines. It should only be considered if things get extremely desperate. The advert-free site is refreshing and welcoming and that is something we should strive to keep, pretty much at all costs.
100% in agreement with you. Ant
My agreement is tempered only by curiousity about what Wikimedia will do now that there is a nearly 5 million dollar budget for next year when the public will not donate more than 2 million during this fundraiser.
I personally don't think it's a COI etc to have adsense or something similar, but it seems like a lot of *readers* do. I read a lot of sentiments that say, "stay ad free", "thanks for the free and ad-free info" etc. I don't really agree that this is as important as it seems to the people writing it, but there you go.
A good solution, I think, would be to just use google for search. It wouldn't make the huge profits we could make with adsense, but I don't think we need those kind of profits. It also has the benefit of not covering pages with ads, sort of in the same style Firefox makes money without anyone knowing about it.
I know people love lucene because it's open source etc, but honestly, I think most people use google to search anyway.