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

[Ilya Haykinson]

On 10/23/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Dori wrote:
> >>Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for
> >>us.  It's for them.  It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives
> >>of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's
> >>empowered with the knowledge to do so.
> >
> > Let me be just as blunt, I think that's a fairy tale and unlikely to
> > happen.
>
> Ok, but that's what I've devoted my life to doing. :-)
>

Jimbo et al,

If one looks at the growth of Wikipedia, it'll become very obvious
that information and knowledge is very important to people: they flock
to us because we give them structured knowledge.

I think that it is critical to give access to this knowledge to
everyone in the world -- to eliminate at least _that_ roadblock
between poverty/dependence and success/independence.

I would strongly urge the foundation to take even further, stronger
steps to make this possible. If we're really passing up $1 million in
revenues every month, perhaps we should let some of that in -- let us
try to use some of the wealth of our readers in the industrialized
world to help us with our goal of delivering knowledge to the
developing world.

I can live with a few Google ads; but I'd hate myself for having an
anti-advertising stance delay our ability to deliver this encyclopedia
to those who might need it. Perhaps with a feature to let anonymous
users see ads but to hide them from registered users we can strike a
compromise?

All that said, I would suggest that "partner" vs. "advertiser" are
fuzzy legal terms; when it comes to promotion of a product they seem
to be interchangable. We can argue about semantics all week long, but
the real argument seems to be "does Wikimedia really need money?" and
I believe that Jimbo's pretty much given us the final answer here.

-ilya haykinson