[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership

[Delirium]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>What do you mean how? They track usage. I don't trust a company that's
>>out to make money to not abuse their position. Even if they're well
>>intentioned now, they could be bought off.
>>    
>>
>Every website can and often do track usage. Even we log that stuff. 
>  
>
Not every website is a for-profit company mining that data for marketing 
purposes.  In fact, we have a strict privacy policy saying that we will 
never use it for marketing purposes, which answers.com does not appear 
to have.

>  
>
>>"Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's
>>important.
>>    
>>
>
>Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia
>finance? Lemme check. No. 
>  
>
Excuse me?  When did Wikimedia finance get run in a top-down corporate 
manner?  Are you a CEO now, and we're all your paid employees?  You 
realize this is a volunteer encyclopedia project, don't you, and we 
decide what's important?  If this is going to become a "Wikimedia 
corporate decides what's important, and you all better shut up and 
listen and not complain about it", then fuck this, I'm out.

>>Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this? Have we
>>exhausted all other possibilities? Whatever happened to the Google
>>donation? Has the board gone to all possible sources before going to
>>advertising deals?
>>    
>>
>
>This is not an advertising deal. It is one of many partnerships we will need to
>enter to help keep everything running. 
>  
>
No, it is an advertising deal.  Putting a link on our website that 
someone is paying us to put there is clearly advertising.

-Mark