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