On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 4/23/07, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
There is lots of empty screen space on the left, below the interwiki links. Text-only boxes that match the color scheme are only minimally distracting. I'm vaguely uncomfortable with putting ads up, but I think it could be done in ways that are minimally invasive.
From an aesthetic standpoint, I am extremely uncomfortable with this.
Empty screen space means something teerribly valuable that we should do good things with, not an excuse to clutter pages with random text.
and I hate to say it, but my personal view is that adwords would likely be more useful and relevant to many readers than the external links sections on many of enwiki's articles.
I'm awfully sorry you feel this way, Greg. I don't think this is anywhere near the truth, myself. Even in those rare cases where your comment here is appropriate, the nice thing about external links sections is that they improve over time, eventually becoming brilliant; when you see an ad, you can remove it.
It certainly would be nice if we had a good model for operational sustainability, but with individual donations as a function of pageviews decreasing
Cost per pageview also decreases with scale. And we've drastically cut back on the frequency of fundraising drives since they began, if you're going to use "the last two instances represent a trend" arguments. The project as originally conceived is only becoming more scalably supportable by donations alone.
Please distinguish "we are looking for money because we want to grow and expand our mission" from "our initial project is sustainable solely on the strength of voluntary donations". The latter statement remains true and is a tremendous statement to make to the world; one of the real gifts of Wikipedia as a movement and not just as a project. Please do not hide that important statement about sustainability and human nature for the sake of winning an argument.
and no reasonable expectation of increasing growth allowing us to reach lower incremental costs of growth (we're already paying rock bottom prices for bandwidth and hardware),
This should not be true. If it is, the people who know details of our incremental growth costs should make them more widely available so that we can discuss this in specific. We should be able to get much better rates on hardware and bandwidth through in-kind sponsorship if nothing else; and are we even getting either of them at cost?
we *will* need to get creative ... maybe if we intend to keep running at all.
I did not expect FUD from you. Do you have any specific reason to worry about keeping running at all? If so, it has been over a quarter since the last fund drive, and we could certainly start another one to cover basic operations, with specific reasons and transparency.
SJ