Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I'd guess the open questions would be:
- How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF?
Zero impact. Nonprofit means that surplus revenue is not handed to private individuals as a return on investment. The Wikimedia Foundation can funnel as much money as they and their contributors feel they are willing invest in the public good/purpose as per the charter/organization plan/etc. approved by the State of Florida. I have been told that arrangements are in progress to select a CPA and get the first required audit completed.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of approximately 25 billion dollars so given billy boy's and pals past performance in extracting revenue from captive or coerced markets it probably has an annual income from stock dividends or splits anywhere between 2.5 and 5 billion dollars.
That revenue is government regulated and must be spent in accordance with the laws of the state, country or tax haven the foundation is setup within. If you are interested you might be able to find an audit report for past years online somewhere.
- Will the advertising programs be okay with only showing the ads to
some small fraction of our users?
Several potential problems occur to me:
1. Back in the good ol days whenever the issue of revenue came up Jimmy always came forward as a generous sugar daddy with deep pockets. The issue always went away. I believe he made some committments regarding ads and ad revenue. He also made some good points about the benefits of no distraction from the authentic information on an encyclopedia page.
He will probably take a bit of a credibility hit with the forkers he was discouraging if he now decides that advertising is necessary and ok. Certainly I will waste no opportunity to shout it from the housetops.
2. Advertising revenue implies counting who and how may have seen the ads. I am already rationing my use of google and other search engines which spy on me and which are required by law to secretly share the results of this spying with regulatory authorities and secret police. Further, most of the privacy statements are long winded and weasally but eventually get around to some kind of sharing with affiliates, partners, consortium, multinational conglomerate pieces, etc. etc.
Probably the easiest way to implement this user choice is a fork. Answers.com currently supports itself by reporting Wikipedia data packaged with advertising. There are others around the net. Most of them do not provide identification information regarding who owns the revenue stream generated. I sincerely hope they are not affiliated with any of our volunteers, employees or stacked Board members or affiliated assets.
An easy way to experiment would be for Wikia to turn on a fork using user choice as you suggest and find out what happens.
If this would be too potentially detrimental to our all powerful figurehead and beloved God King or the community ..... then some other volunteer, developer, profiteer, or entrepreneur could emulate answers.com using the methods you suggest and possibly get rich.
3. Revenue sources are always applicable to discussion regarding fat cat biases built into information products. The guys with the gold always want to make the rules ... and then change the rules when somebody starts to kick the shit out of them on their own playing field or even demand the dignity due a beast of burden diligently pursuing masters' programs given priority over personal responsibilities or inclinations.
This is somewhat similar to the debates we used to have over whether P'hds simply must have courtesies and preference due their long years of servitude in academia rather than justify their opinions with citations and actual data or arguments if Wikipedia were to attract any adequate expertise to prosper. I wonder how he is doing with his for profit cable venture presenting P'hd'ed expertise freed from academia to the masses?
Who makes the rules around here? The guy that controls the stacked Board controlling the nonprofit foundation paying for the centralized editing bandwidth, the advertisers with the gold, the P'hds with unsubstantiated opionions and no time to make their case piece meal with drooling slackjawed trolls or script kiddies experimenting with Turing Tests, the measily masses of volunteers who show up occasionally, or the enlightened readers/writers of the TINC list?
Regards, lazyquasar