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

[Anthere]

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 
>> Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of
>> the articles?  Not as long as I'm alive, ok?  Anyone who thinks
>> otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm
>> doing and how I spend my life.
> 
> 
> Forgive my scepticism, but if we start accepting advertising and become 
> reliant on it, it isn't unknown for the company who is advertising to 
> pull their adverts, cutting Wikimedia's revenue.

Absolutely.
Just as a huge disaster happening in an country from which we get a 
significant part of our donations would also cut down our revenue.
Just as Yahoo could decide to stop helping with the Korea servers at the 
end of the deal period. We would also have to replace all those servers 
pretty quickly.

Overall, all it really says is that we should have various sources of money.
* Individual donations certainly is our best assets
* Corporate donations should be favored (but are also controversial)
* Grants (again controversial depending on the Foundation giving it)
* Tee-shirt and other item sales (about 200 dollars last year ?)
* Government support (controversial as well)
* Collaboration such as Kennisnet (might be controversial as well...)
* Collaboration such as Answers.com (potentially highly controversial)

But to be sustainable, I think we need diverse sources of income.


> A possibly apocryphal story is of a program on the BBC, I believe it was 
> a car review program, who gave a bad review to a certain American car 
> model. The CEO of the company found out about it, was furious and 
> ordered the advertising team to pull all adverts to punish the TV 
> station. The advertising team replied "sorry sir, but the BBC don't run 
> adverts".
> 
> A lack of adverts is one of the reasons why Wikipedia can be neutral. If 
> we become reliant on others for our existence, they can exert influence 
> over our content. I don't want to see us go down that route.
> 
> Chris

You are perfectly correct. I would totally oppose an ads for a certain 
american car model on [[car]]•
Now the question I would ask, in all honesty, is how do you perceive the 
current deal with Answers.com could have an impact on the neutrality of 
our articles ?

Ant