On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:50 PM, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> wrote: I dont think i necessarily agree with this. Some inline ads would not be entirely unacceptable. All ads should be text-based (not blinking animated gifs, not flash, nothing with audio, etc). Ads should be relegated to a very specific section of the page where there will not be any confusion as to their origin, and where they will not immediately interfere with the user interface. I think that we will put so many restrictions on them that advertisers may not find it profitable to put ads on our site anyway. restricted text-based ads are less distracting and annoying popup ads with all sorts of blinking, flash-based ads with audio and video, long load times, etc. --Andrew Whitworth

Hoi, The question of why ads is in my opinion already a secondary one. The primary one is do we have what it takes financially to do what we aim to do. More specifically does our finances cover our budget. In principle I am against advertisements because they occupy valuable on screen space. It is however exactly because of screen space being valuable that advertisements are able to bring in money. The problem in the discussion that the primary question is not addressed and as I value the aims of the Wikimedia Foundation over my personal preferences against advertisements I find this troubling. There are many things that cost money that have a huge impact on our ability to bring information to the people that we do it all for. And I would like to quote the bible when I argue for the support of the people who read and write less and least resourced languages; "what you do for the least among us, you do for me". (sorry if my English knowledge of scripture is not that good.. you may recognise what I aim to quote anyway). The "stichting" I represent has invested in MediaWiki localisation. It makes some difference. I want to invest more in localisation and in terminology. I want to invest in the availability of great open source fonts that cover at least all the languages we support and all the languages that are in the Incubator (and are recognised in the ISO-15924 standard). In many ways in this way I am doing things that I feel strongly about, several of these things can be done more effectively within the WMF. The WMF is not in a position to do this. The lack of funding does in my opinion seriously affect what it can do. It is also too much occupied in the things that make sense from a first world perspective. The WMF is in many ways an organisation that allows people to do their own thing. Again, the main problem with our discussion about advertisement is first that people do not consider why it would be needed and second because people understand the aims of the WMF differently to the extend that some consider the WMF as nothing but a hosting organisation and not as the movement it also is. Thanks, GerardM On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 1:15 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote: Ha! I wholeheartedly agree. We have better things as a community to focus energy on. I'd personally rather spend the time to solicit donations from all my friends and neighbors, than spend the same amount of time to read through 5 gazillion+ messages about whether blinking is worse than popping up. The happy thing is, I'd almost certainly raise more money by actively doing the former than passively doing the latter. Anyway, I am a little confused about what prompted this latest round of ad-discussions, since I thought it was a pretty settled question many years ago. I feel like this conversation comes back every so often, perhaps like [[El Nino]]: it blows through, causes a few hurricanes, involves new people (but some of the same communities) every time, and then quietly goes away again, leaving weather forecasters to hope there will be a longer break in between cycles next time. Someone with some time should do a meta-analysis of perennial proposals on the mailing lists and the village pump -- is there any periodicity to when, say, the question of advertisements recurs? If so, this would be very useful to chart, so the rest of us can go on vacation and stop reading email 'til it blows over. -- phoebe

I was looking for a reason to try out Google Charts ;) Sorry about the x-axis.. http://tinyurl.com/2rjha4 Now would be a good time to go on vacation, btw. On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 1:36 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: