On 4/22/06, Tony Bruguier tony.bruguier@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I'm new to this list, so please forgive me if I mess up. There's been some talk about advertisement on wikipedia or not. Why not make it optional, so that each user decides if he/she wants to see the advertisement? That way, users can "support" wikipedia or not. I don't think that'd be a sell out.
I think this is a fantastic idea, (although I'm sure it's been heard before), especially if we defaulted it to off and made it a user preference.
But there are a lot of other issues with advertising beyond the community issues, such as the impact on the foundations charitable non-profit status.
In any case, such a move might be a way to start further exploring advertising without upsetting the community or bringing in enough money to cause huge tax complications. It would also give editors who don't donate money because they feel they already donate time a way of helping out with the server bottom line. I suspect would avoid much of the risk of donations going down because people believe we are ad supported, although I don't have enough data to determine how many of our donors are editors/have accounts. It would be nice to collect that data in the future.
I'd guess the open questions would be:
1) How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF? 2) Will the advertising programs be okay with only showing the ads to some small fraction of our users?
Software wise this would be fairly straightforward to implement, and could even be done to a limited extent by the users without developer involvement (by inserting the advertising code in the users monobook.js).