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

[Dori]

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> 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.

We don't keep it around forever though. And I trust our admins more
than some unknown at answers.com.

> > "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.

Do I have to be involved with finance to know that it sounds horrible
(to me) for a non-profit?

> > What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean
> > that we'll be able to fund every project?
>
> Perhaps you should visit the foundation wiki or even the donation page:
> "Imagine a world in which every person has free access
> to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

And your point being? That doesn't answer my questions. Will this
partnership mean even one extra project being funded? Will it mean all
extra projects being funded?

> > If we put in advertising
> > (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be
> > restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more
> > projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?
>
> Strawman. Nobody is proposing that.

Might as well if we're going the corporate advertising route, at least
we can get the most money while we still have all the traffic.

> > 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.

Oh come on Mav, you know very well that it's advertising when someone
pays you to put up a link to their site. That's Google's main
business. Is Google advertising when they put up sponsored links on
their pages to other sites, or are they just in partnerships with a
million sites?

Jimbo, whatever happened to the statement that there would never be
advertising on Wikipedia?

--
Dori