Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
I'm not here to discuss the wording of the fundraising slogans yet again, but this one screams "legal trouble": Wikipedia. Ad-free forever. [Progress bar] [Donate now button] I'd interpret this as "if we reach $7.5M, Wikipedia will be ad-free forever". I really wish that'd be the case, but if not, people (from simple dudes to legal trolls) might come out of the woodwork screaming fraud.
Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Strange, I'd interpret it as "Wikipedia will be ad-free forever. Now, hand over the cash." But afaik the foundation has never said such a thing. The last I heard was Jimbo saying "not anytime soon, and only if there is some major shift in public opinion".
Well, that's certainly a shift from the "never" position. We really have to give props to Jimbo for sticking with it so long though. Money isn't the issue nor the object, and that's the principle that will endure, regardless.
But, putting the ideas in this thread together with an earlier discussion about creating an endowment: Ostensibly there is some validity to the idea that, if people discussed (openly, dammit) how big exactly a permanent Wikipedia endowment would have to be, and then asked the community (ie. the people that give Wikipedia its actual value) for permission to allow ads (small ones, no animation, no scripting, at the bottom of Wikipedia articles) for a just the exactly-calculated period of time necessary to create the target endowment, then people might see that as not violating the principle.
And Wikimedia can do the same if it wants one.
-Stevertigo