On Nov 21, 2003, at 00:25, Daniel Mayer wrote:
IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable future. I think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone may not be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that scenario an added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no more ads!
The last time this was suggested we lost most of the Spanish-language contributors to an acrimonious fork.
If you want to set up your own Wikipedia mirror with ad banners and send the money to the foundation, go for it; but the day there are advertisements on the main Wikipedia site we'll lose a lot of people, including me.
Our primary resource is people, not money; we'd be better off with not enough cash donations from people who care (plus offers of technical help and free hosting) than rolling in dough without people. One of the benefits of the license model after all is that it explicitly allows the content, and thus the project, to live on if the current host folds.
To bring a little extra cash into the foundation without pissing a lot of people off, we might look into merchandizing. An actual usable CD-ROM version could sell at least some token copies (think in particular of those folks in countries where internet access is largely limited to pay-per-minute dial-up), and hey, who doesn't want a Wikipedia T-shirt? :)
(Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)