On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:
What do you mean how? They track usage. I don't trust a company that's out to make money to not abuse their position. Even if they're well intentioned now, they could be bought off.
Every website can and often do track usage. Even we log that stuff.
We don't keep it around forever though. And I trust our admins more than some unknown at answers.com.
"Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's important.
Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia finance? Lemme check. No.
Do I have to be involved with finance to know that it sounds horrible (to me) for a non-profit?
What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean that we'll be able to fund every project?
Perhaps you should visit the foundation wiki or even the donation page: "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
And your point being? That doesn't answer my questions. Will this partnership mean even one extra project being funded? Will it mean all extra projects being funded?
If we put in advertising (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?
Strawman. Nobody is proposing that.
Might as well if we're going the corporate advertising route, at least we can get the most money while we still have all the traffic.
Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this? Have we exhausted all other possibilities? Whatever happened to the Google donation? Has the board gone to all possible sources before going to advertising deals?
This is not an advertising deal. It is one of many partnerships we will need to enter to help keep everything running.
Oh come on Mav, you know very well that it's advertising when someone pays you to put up a link to their site. That's Google's main business. Is Google advertising when they put up sponsored links on their pages to other sites, or are they just in partnerships with a million sites?
Jimbo, whatever happened to the statement that there would never be advertising on Wikipedia?
-- Dori