Just to be clear: I don't think advertising will ever be desirable or necessary for Wikipedia. Even so, I didn't buy all of Tony's arguments against it, and wanted to comment accordingly.
Tony Wilson wrote:
1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link between advertising and influence/control over content establishing itself.
Well, the wiki system itself is a pretty big barrier to such a link.
2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads consume.
Well, actually, advertising already pays for bandwidth and salaries and everything else around here. :-)
3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash
The tide is turning, and strongly. I think that Shockwave and Flash are still on the rise, but still not all that common. Popups are paying less and less, to the point where we (Bomis) just dropped them completely. We have a new ad deal with a major search engine which does context-relevant text ads -- it works great, and pays a lot more than the intrusive stuff!
BUT -- the rest of his comments were correct!
--Jimbo