On 12/30/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The entire issue of advertisements is vexatious. It's easy to see that the kind of money that advertising would bring would soon bring an end to worries about having enough hardware. But after all that hardware is purchased there would be plenty left over, we would be left with a big bank account full of problems. Would we hire new staff? To do what? Who among the longtime committed would not feel a twinge of envy if some newcomer were suddenly hired to be the new Larry Sanger? We would soon learn how many of our active members really live on a shoestring. Maybe we could fund everybody's attendance at the next Wikimania, or we could fund third world projects consistent with a wider vision of bringing knowledge to the most remote corners of the world. Or will someone else see us as the deep pocket that can easily be picked in the courts?
I don't know. Sometimes having too much money can be a bigger problem than having too little.
Ec
I dunno, I don't think it'd be so hard to spend the money. There are billions of people in the world. The mission of Wikipedia is to distribute an encyclopedia to every single of them. I'm going to be bold and make the claim that distribution alone is going to cost billions of dollars.
Granted, that doesn't mean Wikipedia has to spend all that money itself. Partnering up with other companies and non-profit organizations to do the distribution might be smarter. Even using peer-to-peer distribution channels can work in many areas. But there are plenty of positive ways to spend money.
There are plenty of negative ways too.
And actually, I'm not 100% convinced that the WMF *can* make hundreds of millions of dollars off of advertising without jeopardising its charity status. I've read in IRS documents that advertising revenue is generally considered unrelated business income. Rely too much on unrelated business income, and you're no longer a charity. I went to Guidestar and read the 990s for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and WHYY, INC (a PBS affiliate), because WHYY most definitely does have advertising on their service, but I haven't been able to figure out how they're classifying their advertising income, and why. Of course even that is different from the Wikipedia situation if Wikipedia chooses to use advertising revenue from web to fund non-web projects.
I just found something else. "PBS ENTERPRISES, INC., a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary of PBS, was incorporated in December 1984. PBS ENTERPRISES, INC., was organized to pursue revenue-producing projects and services as part of an ongoing effort to increase public television's financial base." Looking further, apparently the Mozilla Corporation was created for similar reasons.
If the WMF wants to create a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary which would run a mirror-site with ads, I don't really see how anyone could have a problem with that.
Anthony