Daniel Mayer wrote:
All Jimmy did was state the blindingly obvious; that we are literally giving up millions
of
dollars of potential revenue that could be used to further the foundation's goal of
providing free
knowledge to everybody.
It's not entirely that simple, though. Say Jimbo had decided in 2001 to
put ads on Wikipedia. Since then, we've gotten enough pageviews to have
made many millions of dollars from those ads. The site doesn't exist in
a vacuum, though---had Jimbo decided in 2001 to put ads on Wikipedia,
Wikipedia may well not have grown in the manner it actually has. It may
have even found itself with a major fork, a la what happened with the
Spanish-language Wikipedia. In which case there wouldn't have been the
same pageviews and therefore ad revenue after all.
-Mark