On 23/04/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Hence floating it here. At present wikipedia.com is all but deprecated. Could someone please forward this to the strongest objectors from last time? *The* stable version, the checked and lovely product. No change whatsoever in wiki-anything.org. We get one hell of a lot more readers than we do editors. If the known not-bad version is on .com, that'll encourage linking to it. - d.

On 4/22/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: If this is done, the .com site should be run independently. A separate corporation, with a separate board, a separate set of books, a separate staff, etc. The .com site would have no more power than Answers.com to affect content. There are *already* sites out there which make *a lot* of money using Wikipedia content. Wikipedia.com would be at least as successful as they are, and it'd have one huge advantage - the right to use the Wikipedia trademark. Presumably it'd get a pretty sweet live feed too, but apparently other mirrors already get that. Anthony

On 4/23/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I am slightly confused by this attempt at a line of reasoning. I do think that compromising our neutrality would be essentially an ethical problem, although of course there would be our reputation on teh line as well. Furthermore, I find arguing from a *specific* type of advertising compromising our integrity, to the conclusion that all adverts would necessarily have the same effect, is highly suspect logic. That said; what you say does very clearly underline the point that as geni and David said above, everything would have to be thought through very deeply and carefully. But to think on the proactive, positive side of this question, can somebody point out which kinds of adverts *would* not compomise our values? Putting ads on search pages is a *bad* *bad* *bad* idea. Our search is the worst and most irritating feature of the whole mediawiki software, and to compound it by putting adverts on it, ARRGH, words fail me. Reply to 3): As was said above the wikipedia.com pages would be teh safe and sweet checked out and stable versions, and thus preferrable by schools etc. That would help direct traffic towards them gradually, likely the site would be faster too. Reply to 1): I confess that I daily visit many sites with ads on them, and they only annoy me if they pop up to obscure the text or when they slow down the page loading. I think if we avoided both those and the other possible egregious annoyances - pages would load fast, and ads would not be popping up in your face - I personally think it might well be what I myself would check first wikipedia.com on many instances, when I was not actively searching for things to edit. Reply to 2): Perhaps it was not spelled out, my understanding (I certainly think it would be fundamentally a requirement) is that teh article pages should certainly each and every time *advertise* (heh) the fact that we have the editable version which may either be more up to date, or on the other hand may have deteriorated to some degree, and which we would welcome work on, if the reader knows about the subject, or is otherwise happy to volunteer to improve our content in genereal. As a final thought, I think movement in this should be very careful, paced, considered and deliberate, and even after the site went up, I find it provable that for a long time the .org side would quite easily dominate the popular imagination. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

On 4/22/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I don't think that that's true; arm's length advertisement such as Google ads would have no realistic way to affect content. Michelin would have no relationship with us, and we wouldn't care who put ads or didn't put ads and thus we would have no incentive to favor anyone who did. (The more layers of separation between the individual advertisers and those producing the content, the better.) Would this affect others' *perception* of our neutrality? Maybe, and that's a big issue to consider. I've heard the argument that we might be seen as non-neutral come up more from active editors than people who are only users. Most of the people I talk to who aren't actively involved in the site don't realize we don't have ads already, though a small number are happy that it is one of the last ad-free reference sites you don't have to pay to access. Indeed, the visited website is the .org. Putting ads on the .org would bring in boatloads of money at a time, probably more than we are able to deal with. Putting ads on a less-visited .com? Maybe only small raft-loads, or a few teacups full; I really don't know. (Of course, many people do still assume that we are a dot-com and link there instead of the .org...) My primary issue with something like that is that I want people who are interested in editing to have as easy a time as possible figuring out how to do that, and so I'd want a huge, spinning, singing, dancing, blinking sitenotice that said "hey, come help us edit" and linked to the editable .org. But people visit the non-editable mirrors all the time, and their viewership helps bring in funding to other sites that are largely based off of the content produced by the Wikimedia community. I am not a fan of ads on the main site, not because of neutrality issues, but because they're distracting and ugly, and the content isn't useful compared to other things that could be taking up the screen space; I want us to pursue other funding options. But I don't think they are contrary to our mission, and I do think we could do a lot of good work from the steady stream of additional income. -Kat -- Wikimedia needs you: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:Mindspillage mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone

On 4/23/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.

2007/4/23, SJ Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>om>: Well, I tested it, doing a 'Random page' several times, and checking the first 10 that had external links. They were all checked in intervals of three months 1. [[John Addey]] October 2005: Three links, two advertizing, one non-advertizing but irrelevant. Apparently added by someone who did not know how to link externally January 2006, April 2006, July 2006, October 2006, January 2007: no change now: Same links, but as proper external links. Conclusion: Advertisement, not changing over time 2. [[Kay Hammond (American actress)]] now: One link to IMDB Conclusion: No advertisement, too young to talk about time difference 3. [[Goldeen]] October 2006: 7 links. 6 seemed ok, the seventh one doesn't load January 2007, now: no change Conclusion: No advertisement but probably over-linked. Not changing over time. 4. [[Brewer's Blackbird]] January 2004: No links upto July 2005: No change October 2005: One link, mildly advertising January 2006: Link removed as 'linkspam' upto October 2006: No change January 2007: 3 non-advertising links Now: No change Conclusion: Managed without links quite long, but the ones that are there now are fine. Advertising control has been done, although probably only because the advertiser was overdoing it. 5. [[Darrick Martin]] April 2006: Two links, not advertising (although commercial websites) July 2006: No change October 2006: One added link, not advertising (but overlap with existing links) January 2007, now: No change Conclusion: Ok 6. [[Wanderer (sailing dinghy)]] January 2006: Two links, one of them advertisement April, July, October 2006, July 2007: No change Now: One added link, advertisement Conclusion: Advertisement link stays on for a long time - so long that apparently the only one who noticed that there was one was a competitor who reacted by adding their own link as well. 7. [[Bommenede]] October 2006: One link, non-advertisement January 2007, now: No change 8. [[Dens (anatomy)]] October 2006: 5 links, non-advertisement January 2007, now: No change 9. [[Isihia]] July 2006: 1 link, non-advertisement October 2006, January 2007, now: No change 10. [[Cathedral and John Connon School]] October 2005: 1 link, non-advertisement January 2006: No change April 2006: 2 more links, non-advertisement July 2006: 1 more link, non-advertisement (but not very good link either) October 2006, January 2007, now: No change On the good side of things, there seem to be not very much advertisement. Out of 31 links on these articles, 5 were advertisements. On the bad side of things, of the 5 advertisements only 1 got deleted. I doubt whether they were ever actually checked on being non-advertising and relevant. The one that did get deleted was the least blatant advertising, but got deleted because the site was being spammed. Apparently it is allowed to advertize on one or two Wikipedia pages, but not to do it on 100. Finally, none of these subjects seem to be among subjects likely to get advertisements - only [[Wanderer (sailing dinghy)]] is about something that can be sold. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

On 23/04/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Think of the ad money, think of things to do with it, then add them to the list! (where's the list?) - d.

Rich Holton wrote: an ad at the fork of the road fine dining

On Mon, April 23, 2007 14:43, Rich Holton wrote: Maybe the preceding line puts the suggestion better: ANNAS: But you might as well take it - we think that you shuold. Personally, I think that putting *any* advertising on any of the wiki*.tld sites that we own would reduce the impact of our message and be totally misunderstood where it matters. ie: ANNAS: Cut the protesting, forget the excuses We want information ... Alison ps. David G: could you tag your posts "[irony]" or "[humour]" as some people reading them - especially if they aren't aware of your sense of humour - might think you are being serious / sane!

David Gerard wrote: Your "modesty" is commendable. Ec

On 4/22/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: This sounds very strange to me coming from you, possibly the last person save Jimbo I would think would have difficulty thinking of things WMF could do with lots of money. Here's a small list: *more operational staff *developers, developers, developers *sponsoring free software projects that produce tools we use to run the site *more local meetings and small conferences of Wikimedians *more outreach into schools and communities *more outreach into poor communities, perhaps giving them computers loaded with Wikipedia and cameras to take pictures of their area that don't exist on the web. *buying more hardware to place caches in datacenters where other people can give us bandwidth *buying rights to content we would like to make free *sponsoring student research on Wikimedia projects and conference fees *locating and scanning old PD materials *buying subscriptions to databases for community members to use for sources *producing more print materials *hiring people with specialized skills to fill in gaps -- translators to start off every new wiki with a starter set of important pages, musical groups to create recordings of free music *better image quality on the site *capacity for more video and multimedia content *setting up more local offices for volunteers to work together *placing advertisements in subject-specific publications and sites to attract volunteers who know about areas where we don't have enough content Some of these may or may not be good ideas; each one of them could easily start a thread debating the merits. Some of them were brought up when Jimbo asked what we could do with the hypothetical $100M, and I'm sure there are some good ones I'm forgetting. The point is that it's easy to think of things we could do with more money to further our goals, and it's hard to get enough money to do them. At our current pace, we'll never get enough money to do them; we're always just barely keeping up with keeping the lights on, the servers running, and the office staff functioning on caffeine and hope. That's not what I want our future as an organization to be. I'm not committed to any particular way of raising the money. I am committed to certain things we will *not* do -- for example, nothing that involves altering content, and nothing that involves giving exclusive rights to any particular resource of ours. Coming up with a good way to do this that doesn't exhaust our donors is hard, and help with this is always welcome (are there any professional fundraisers on the list?). But to plan out what we could do if we weren't resource-limited... I think that's the easy part. -Kat -- Wikimedia needs you: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:Mindspillage mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone

Even if I'm not strongly against the idea, I must say I won't encourage it. Many many problems would occur. First of all, from the community. We all remember what happened just six month ago with this tiny virgin unite logo, do you remember? I do. Now imagine the same situation but now with google adds... even if it's not editable, for the contributors it wouldn't change a thing. Now, we're claming for ages that we won't have adds... who would think we're serious if 4month ago we said "adds? no way" and now we say "Adds? Yes, on every single article"... Is that serious, not really... Let's continue about PR, in January we had "problems" with some AP/Reuters/AFP news claiming wikia is the commercial side of Wikipedia... try to guess what would happen "Hey they're no more neutral blablabla, they're having adds...". I know, I know we shouldn't care too much of the media, but if we want to make things move to move forward in the Foundation ends we have to keep being "neutral" in every single part of the projects. Now about the stable/editable. At the moment it remains hard for people to understand "anyone can edit" the website. Even if the Community is becoming really big, we still needs more and more volounteer. If we set up the stable, people, in the end, will only go on the stable version, and so soon or late there will be a lack of volounteer... Finally, as I said in an other mail one of the Foundation ends is "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.", this mean, setting up a non editable advertised website, don't fit with this. So this mean is not, imo, a solution. On 23/04/07, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- schiste

On 23/04/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: So, do we in fact need ads (or other income streams) to keep the sites live or not? David seems to be suggesting we do. Others have suggested we do not. Guilting us into accepting ads based on scaremongering of "the sites might go down" is one thing. Rationalising that we could use squillions of cash to buy back copyrights and pay for content writers, etc, is another. So - ? Jean-Baptiste is right, that Wikimedia is a nice oasis. So is that a first-world conceit that doesn't mean much, or if we were to introduce ads might we not all lament it in five, 20 years when we see the Foundation wasn't going to collapse, after all? regards, Brianna user:pfctdayelise

You do have to consider whether irritating a non-negligible portion of the content-writing community will help us accomplish our mission better, though. As I pointed out to Gmaxwell on IRC yesterday, yes, there may be only a few "loud" (for lack of a better word) users that completely oppose advertising, but if they distribute their message properly and play their cards right, you could be talking about an Enciclopedia Libre-type of split. Wikipedia's advantage, at least on the English Wikipedia, is that it is THE Wikipedia, and a fork claiming that they're the descendent of the NPOV policy or some other claim may come back to hurt us in the longer term. Titoxd. -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 1:09 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A modest proposal: ads on wikipedia.com On 23/04/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm suggesting we might find it very useful indeed, rather than living hand-to-mouth as we do now. Of course, it might stimulate serious thought to securing other revenue streams, as it seems to be doing, to stave off such an unaesthetic idea. Not just the possibility of failure, but the possibility of not doing nearly as well on our mission as we could. "To educate everyone with a broadband connection" is not entirely convincing. - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Hoi, When a Encyclpaedia-libre kinda split is isolated to one or two projects, it makes little difference. It might be akin to Citizendium .. They run the danger of getting isolated in their own little world, their own little language, their own ideology. When people are loud, it does not mean that they have what it takes to start a project of such a size and complexity. Also, having more projects working on Free content is not a bad thing. If this is what it takes to move forward, to explore avenues that would otherwise be closed .. I see more advantages than disadvantages. Thanks, GerardM On 4/23/07, Titoxd@Wikimedia < titoxd.wikimedia(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 4/23/07, Brianna Laugher &lt;brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I like this idea. I think wikipedia.com could be an excellent place to have a page of the type: "Welcome to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not like other web companies out there. [a bit of passionate text about what makes us different] Now, if you want to read Wikipedia content, please go to .. If you want to support Wikipedia, please go to .." This would allow us to retain redirects from article URLs as well. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 4/22/07, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: I'd support doing that right away unless there's a good reason not to, actually. :-) -Kat -- Wikimedia needs you: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:Mindspillage mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone

On 4/23/07, Kat Walsh &lt;kat(a)mindspillage.org&gt; wrote: YAY! This is a step in the right direction. I know the German and French chapters have been thinking for a while about such portals for wikipedia.de and wikipedia.fr for example. This is definitely a very important move towards communicating the right message. Thanx Erik and Kat. Delphine -- ~notafish NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will probably get lost.

On 5/5/07, Daniel Mayer &lt;maveric149(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: The odds of any such company being able to compete effectivly with answers.com and the like are minimal. -- geni

On 5/5/07, Daniel Mayer &lt;maveric149(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: I am opposed to the notion that higher accuracy / reliability is an added value that people have to pay for with advertising. These should be intrinsic properties of Wikipedia itself. If anything, we need fewer brands, not more. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic