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.
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.
It is true that this is more a negative comment about the degree of editorial oversight over our external links sections, than a reason to do ads... But really, there is no discussion about "ads on Wikipedia" because Wikipedia is already filled with ads. The question is about also running ads which fund the foundation's mission and which are clearly separated from the content and minimize the introduction of bias.
It certainly would be nice if we had a good model for operational sustainability, but with individual donations as a function of pageviews decreasing 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), we *will* need to get creative if we ever want to do anything more than operate the worlds largest game of [[nomic]] and maybe if we intend to keep running at all.