Arvind Narayanan wrote:
No way!! Many people, me included, contribute to wikipedia because of a spirit of freedom/communist zeal/whatever that would largely evaporate if wikipedia started serving ads. Even a symbolic thing like the change from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org was a big motivation for me. Anyway didn't Jimbo promise us long back that there would *never* be ads on wikipedia? :)
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!
I think that would work out OK, because the freedom/communistic feelings you talk about (and I share) are far more prevalent in contributors than they are in readers. In fact readers expect to see some form of advertising on content websites like Wikipedia (some have expressed unease over the /absence/ of advertising, thinking that Wikipedia would one day disappear due to a lack of income). So if needed I think we can have advertisements if it is done right and it isn't distracting (ala smart Google text ads). Oh and banner ads, skyscrappers and especially pop-ups should be avoided like the plague.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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)
On Nov 21, 2003, at 07:35, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
(Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)
And t-shirts, yes.
Coooooool. If I buy one, will it help fund getting Nupedia back online? :D
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
On Nov 21, 2003, at 07:35, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
(Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)
And t-shirts, yes.
Coooooool. If I buy one, will it help fund getting Nupedia back online? :D
They might as well be sold, for cost recovery unless there is a plan to revive the Nupedia name for the 1.0 project. They can't be very useful just sitting in Jimbo's basement. :-)
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
They might as well be sold, for cost recovery unless there is a plan to revive the Nupedia name for the 1.0 project. They can't be very useful just sitting in Jimbo's basement. :-)
Well, the cost was low, and that was back in the dot-com mania era when I was making the big bucks. ;-)
But you're right, they aren't doing any good where they are. The big problem with selling them is that for any _reasonable_ prices, I'd rather just give money to Wikipedia than earn money for Wikipedia by schlepping junk to the post office.
What I mean is, if I sold 100 coffee mugs at $10 apiece, that'd be $1,000. But it'd also be a huge personal problem for me, since now I've got to make labels and do postage and everything for 100 coffee mugs, plus set up a way to take orders and what not. And international sales require me to fill out customs paperwork.
I might as well have a bake sale, if you see what I mean. :-)
But if someone has a burning desire to give $1000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, but doesn't have that kind of dough, but does have the time and energy to do mailorder house work, then it could make sense for us to do this, if someone else wants to volunteer to take the goods and ship them out.
It isn't just the money, it's also the community spirit, but for community spirit, what we ought to do is just setup with a service like CafePress and use the new Wikimedia Logo.
Or, maybe we should have a vote on whether we need a separate logo for mugs and shirts. (Jimbo ducks and runs. :-)
--Jimbo
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!
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.
I expect that this trial balloon will come up from time to time, and I agree wiith Brion that the results could cause more harm than good. I support the view that the project should eventually become financially self-sufficient without being dependent on one single person, but any of us who have been here for any length of time are bound to have an idea about what annoys the public.
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.
Not having the money .makes people more creative and inventive. Depending on a single source sounds like an argument for Wiki-Welfare. Cutting off the stable funding (whether in cash or in kind) would be disruptive. The content would survive, but the project itself would be severely set-back while waiting for new hosting to be established and publicized so that people would know where to find it. NPOV could be the biggest victim.
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? :)
Yeah! Who's working on the 1.0 project? The VfD debate showed that we have a lot of people who might be better suited to the kind of atmosphere that that project requires. Going through all the articles to determine what is suitable is going to take a lot of work. Those editors will also need to call on Wikipedians to write articles to fill in what is missing; that too will take time. A 1.0 editorial board that started meeting to-day, would likely still be at least a year away from having a marketable product. 20,000 CDs with a budgeted profit of 50cents each is $10,000 net.
T-shirts with the new logo would also be a great marketing device.
(Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)
These seem a little dated now. :-)
Ec
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!
...
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
Please no one interpret my comment here as endorsing this concept. I'm merely making a technical comment to help further the discussion.
Carl Witty wrote:
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.
This scheme could be implemented more cleanly by using a cookie rather than a separate domain. A person visiting the donate page could find a link to set a cookie that says 'ads=true'. After that, they would see ads until they turned them off. Alternatively, this could be an option in user preferences.
I think that the amount of money that such a setup would generate would be extremely tiny, since most people would not ever even see the link. The vast majority of pageviews on the site are people surfing in randomly from all over the web.
Even so, I will say that from a technical perspective this would not be hard to setup fairly seamlessly.
--Jimbo
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.
There are ways to deal with ads and communists. A dynamic website such as Wikipedia can serve ads selectively, only to readers who use MSIE and who are not logged in. The "communists" (who run open source browsers) will never notice that the ads exist, and will happily continue to contribute to the contents. Of course this is evil, but it keeps them quiet.
This is not a recommendation, only experience.
On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
No way!! Many people, me included, contribute to wikipedia because of a spirit of freedom/communist zeal/whatever that would largely evaporate if wikipedia started serving ads. Even a symbolic thing like the change from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org was a big motivation for me. Anyway didn't Jimbo promise us long back that there would *never* be ads on wikipedia? :)
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!
Why don't we do the opposite: Have opt-in ads for logged in users. So that way we'd only be showing ads to the people who specifically requested them without alienating anyone else. Hopefully enough people will be happy to have ads on to make it worthwhile (and profitable) for wikipedia.
Imran
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