On 12/28/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Dedalus dedalus@wikipedia.be wrote:
Somebody else mentioned the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's in
the
press they would like to raise the level of primary and secondary
education
in the US. Wikiversity and or Wikibooks might be helpful in raising the level of education there and elsewhere. Suppose the Bill and Melinda
Gates
Foundation would like to grant some money to WMF on the condition that
it
would be for specific projects, e.g. Wikibooks or Wikiversity, would
that
raise any objections by anyone?
Not by me. Also, the charge that the current message is an advertisement sounds bizarre to me since no product or service is even mentioned, let alone pushed.
From Wikipedia: "*Advertising* is paid communication through a non-personal
medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. Variations include publicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publicity, public relations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations, product placementhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement, sponsorship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship, underwritinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwriting_spots, and sales promotion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_promotion."
Hmmmmmm.
The message is simply an acknowledgement of a very generous donation that is
linked to the amount of money our readers can give in a day; this is an inducement to donate. It is NOT an inducement to buy any product or service of Virgin Unite or the Virgin group of companies.
This is no different than the sponsorship messages seen or heard on the non-profits NPR and PBS.
Right. Those, too, are ads.