Kurt Jansson wrote:
If we once *really* need the money we should use opt-out, but I hope this will never happen.
I am of the opinion that we will never "need" the money. I think the challenge to the community is going to be from a different direction: how much good could we do to further our goals as a charitable institution, and does that good outweigh our distaste for advertising.
As a thought experiment, consider a day 2 years in the future when Wikipedia is serving 1 billion pageviews per month, and we are continuing to easily fund the site's growth through donations, grants, etc.
A conservative estimate (in my experience, which is valid I think) of how much revenue we could generate with Google Adwords or similar, i.e. no banners, no flashing lights, no popups, would be around $1 per thousand. So a billion pageviews a month generates at least $1 million per month. Even with the ability for people who hate ads to opt-out with a single click, the revenue would be substantial.
For $12 million a year, how many millions of CDs could we make available to charities building media centers in the slums of New Delhi? If we work wisely with for-profit or non-profit organizations in developing countries, we can subsidize their production to leverage their ability to profitably and sustainably make our work widely available everywhere.
My dream is to create a comprehensive free encyclopedia to be distributed at extremely low cost to them to every single person on the planet. Is our distaste for ads so high that we are willing to deny the people who don't even have access to clean drinking water a copy of a work that could help empower them to change their lives?
To sum up, I don't think we will ever "need" the money to keep doing what we are doing. But I think the day may come when we have to make a very tough decision about what kind of good we could do with the money.
I have my own opinion about what we should do when that day comes, which you might or might not be able to glean from the above, but for now I remain firmly opposed to advertising on Wikipedia, for all the reasons that many people have already mentioned: credibility, good taste, the feeling that we are doing something extra-ordinary, etc.
--Jimbo
p.s. Lest any trolls wants to make up some claims about this, let me be perfectly clear. If the day ever comes when we decide that we can do so much good with advertising money that we should not turn it down, that decision is not going to come top-down from me, but from the community as a whole.