On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 00:56, Brion Vibber wrote:
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!
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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.
I don't know how much ad space is worth, so this is probably way too much effort for way too little money, but how about this:
en.wikipedia.org gets a sister site en.ads.wikipedia.org (or .com). This is exactly the same, except that it serves ads. Part of the "how to donate" links explain that you can give wikipedia a little extra money by browsing the with-ads version. Every page on the with-ads version has a link to the corresponding without-ads page ("Click _here_ to see this site without the ads"). The with-ads version sets up robots.txt to avoid search engines.
I, for one, would use the with-ads site, if I knew it was helping donate even tiny amounts of money to the foundation.
Carl Witty