On Feb 7, 2008 3:13 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
However, your email does, except for it's shape and wordings, suggest more that it is all about making a point to the community, that you want to start a discussion. If you want to do so, maybe it's more useful to just write it a little more general, and make the topic a little more clearer: you want that the WMF researches the possibilities of advertizements. In that way we could have a more open discussion about the topic :)
The topic has, however, been discussed to death. I don't see any particularly new arguments in Simon's email (it basically boils down to: Everyone else does it and we could make a hell of a lot of money out of it), so I don't see a useful discussion taking place.
Indeed, it is one of the most hoary of the Perennial Proposals, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Advertising
Perhaps deserving a hall of fame award for # of bytes expended in discussion (maybe even more of Zachte's magical mailing-list analysis could rank arguments this way, telling us, for instance, exactly how many Britannica-volume equivalents we have expended in text discussing attack sites, CC licenses or advertising. I'm sure it's a whole meta-encyclopedia unto itself).
Re: Simon's argument, I don't think most of us are in it for the money.
-- phoebe