Brion Vibber wrote:
It's about free/open educational content. It's about making materials open and available for use by the public, including the creation of derivative works and redistribution.
Exactly, but you you miss the point completely Brion. It's advertisement at a location where the free content is CREATED, not redistributed/mirrored. Actually I don't care about if people make money with Wikipedia content, the same applies for Linux distributions, but we are talking about advertisement on the location where the content is created. That kills our reliability, so far we have that allready.
How? Please explain.
Well. I think it would be interesting to take a very close look how this "non-advertisement" in sitenotice affects the content of the article of "non-advertised" company or organization.
Take a look on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Unite
which was created first on 14:35 December 2007, and had almost 100 edits till now. I am quite sure that it would have never be edited so extensively if the logo of this organisation hadn' been used in sitenotice. This is rather obvious that this logo indeed has quite enormous effect on the content of this particular article. I am not judging if this effect was good or wrong.
What we may be afraid of: *The company "non-advertised" on sitenotice might be interested to keep the article about itself in the shape they would prefer, and they may expect that someone from Foundation will take care of it *It may end-up in agressive edit war, which may result in blocking this article *There will be more such articles, so the problem will grow soon.
This was not discussed yet, but if Foundation make a decision to put some "real" advertisement on Wikipedia and other projects, how it may affect the articles about advertised companies and organisation as well as biographic articles about the people conected with these companies and articles about products/services they provide?
It is really difficult to evaluate this without any experimental data, but I think many people fell that it may create some sort of conflict of interest.