Jimbo wrote:
My own view is that it is unlikely that the Amazon link would bring in very much money anyway. It's incidental revenue at best. If I'm right, then there's no reason to have a big discussion and fight over something that wouldn't matter much anyway.
It would not only be Amazon but /every/ similar service we could enter agreements with. I'm pretty sure that that would generate an not-insignificant amount of money (maybe enough to pay your cost for Wikimedia bandwidth).
I estimate, by the way, that if we accepted google adwords ads, we could bring in $20,000- $40,000 per month right now. So if we want to have a big fight, we should fight about that. :-)
Wow! Google ad-words are those little text ads on the right hand side of Google searches, right? Those seem to be very well-suited to whatever I am searching for and I in fact find them useful. However, we already have had one fork over just the rumor of advertising and some people have stated that they would leave the project if we started to have ads. I'm far more pragmatic and think that having something unobtrusive (and in fact useful to readers!) like Google adwords would be a great thing to have. But IMO, this should only be shown to non-logged-in users. Why? Well those people who are logged-in are much more likely contribute to Wikimedia by adding content, while those who don't log-in are most likely just to be readers. They should contribute as well by being exposed to unobtrusive (and in fact useful) adwords.
A mock-up of a Wikipedia article with adwords will be needed. Then we should have a wide-ranging discussion on the pros and cons of having them. When that is done we should have a two-level vote: A Wikimedia-wide vote on Meta about whether to allow /any/ Wikimedia wiki to have adwords. If say 75% of Wikimedians vote to allow adwords at all then there would be a per wiki vote on the respective wikis on whether or not to have adwords on their wiki (75% margin needed there as well).
Some problems; What are we going to do with all that money? If we can't spend it, would that jeopardize our nonprofit status? I think it would be a step backwards for Wikimedia to become a for-profit organization.
Some possible ways to solve above problems; Hire mostly part-time executives (with maybe a full-time President) and programming staff and use the leftover money to fund paper/CD publication and distribution (heck maybe even buy ultra-cheap GNU/Linux boxes with all Wikimedia content preloaded on them).
Just some thoughts.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org