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

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/25/05, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As much as you are entitled to an opinion, Anthony and Mark have an equal
> right to their opinion. They do not expect people to leave in the first
> place over having ads or not. To their opinion extremely few people would
> walk away and these are in his opinion extremist that we may be better of
> without. Now by painting the other party as having an anti community
> attitude is over the top.

 The statement I made about being better off without those people was
ill-conceived. It was a gut reaction to some statements by Dori that I think
were over the top. If someone comes to a conclusion after some consideration
and discussion that they'd rather not participate in Wikipedia if it engages
in advertising, that's too bad.
 At the same time, I find it hard to see why someone would rationally come
to this conclusion. And I find it even harder to see why someone would leave
just because the possibility of advertising is raised. I've always been of
the opinion that if we ever have ads they should be easy to turn off, both
by editors and casual readers. I could even see an argument that editors
should have them turned off by default.
 What I probably find the hardest to understand is why we can't just
implement a trial of opt-in ads, which would only displayed to those who
turn them on. If the calculations of some of us are right, only 5% of
Wikipedians would have to turn them on to pay for the entire site. But some
of the extremists would leave over even that, and I find that very hard to
fathom.

> Suggesting that other technical models may be considered is nice. It is
> not
> something that is easily done and, it ignores the amount of work done to
> make it as scalable as it is today. Moving to another architecture is also
> made more problematic because we are growing as much as before and it is
> not
> trivial to move to a different architecture. P2P is nice but how are we
> going to ensure that we have the data in the first place, how do you
> ensure
> that little used data does not disapear ? We will still need our data
> stored
> somewhere. P2P works nice for popular content.. we have a lot of content
> that is not.

 I think P2P is a promising solution for the future. It probably wouldn't be
pure P2P though, it its simplest form you'd use P2P to replace the squids,
and the rest would stay as is. You could pull out more and more of the
infrastructure though, to the point where maybe a dozen database servers
would be all that Wikipedia had to run. One major issue would be that
content would have to be signed, and most (or all) browsers wouldn't support
that without downloading some sort of plugin.
 I think it'd work, but we'd need a backup plan, and donations probably
aren't going to cut it.