Brion VIBBER wrote:

This has the added benefit for the paranoid anti-corporate set of not making it look like Wikipedia is forcing commercial links down the throats of the unwary. Remember, we don't want to end up looking like The Fact Factory. ;)

As the recipient of such negative sentiments, I think this is pretty important.

It would not be a bad thing for these links to generate money for the project, so that the project can buy the next round of servers instead of me buying the next round of servers. But, we have a _mission_ here that's very important. We want to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

The wiki nature provides a fairly absolute check against corporate money influencing the reporting of the encyclopedia, but nevertheless, we want to stay squeaky clean on that front, even if we do someday choose to generate revenue from affiliate book links.

One way to do that would be to say: look, here's a bunch of book stores. Use the one that's best for you. We don't like Amazon much, for reasons X, Y, and Z. But if you are going to shop there anyway, please use this link so that they make less money and wikipedia can have a little dough for new servers and what not.

I also think full disclosure of any revenue, when and if that happens, will be important.

But seriously, I think that the best method of revenue will be a program of sponsorship where we can accept credit cards and people can sign up for a monthly patronage. I think plenty of the regulars would be willing to chip in $10 or $20 a month, particularly if they could see, transparently, that the money would not be to finance my extravagant lifestyle, but to directly benefit the project through hardware purchases and whatnot.

--Jimbo

Jimbo wrote at last:

But seriously, I think that the best method of revenue will be a program of sponsorship where we can accept credit cards and people can sign up for a monthly patronage. I think plenty of the regulars would be willing to chip in $10 or $20 a month, particularly if they could see, transparently, that the money would not be to finance my extravagant lifestyle, but to directly benefit the project through hardware purchases and whatnot.

Ah, but this finances your extravagant lifestyle *indirectly*, if subscriptions purchase hardware that you otherwise would have.

^_^

-- Toby