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

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/25/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
> To be clear, I was actually responding to Anthony's message by taking
> the opposite view---I'm quite anti-advertisements. He suggested that
> only a few people would leave if we put ads on, and we'd be better off
> without them anyway. I was saying that there's an easy way to find out,
> but I doubt the board will do it---perhaps what I should have added
> explicitly is that they won't do that because they're smart enough not
> to (even if they thought it was a good idea, which they almost certainly
> don't). I do think quite a lot of good editors would leave if GoogleAds
> were put on Wikipedia, and not just a few extremists that we'd be better
> off without.
>
> -Mark

 No, you're right. Apparently a poll was done at Wikimania and 2/3 of people
were against it and 1/3 said they'd leave. So yeah, there's one good
argument not to have ads, I guess. I just can't figure out what any of the
other ones are.
 It's also not clear what percentage of those who would leave would be
willing to stay under certain circumstances. Ads for just non-logged in
users? Opt-out ads? Opt-in ads? The choices are a lot broader than just ads
or no ads.
 Anthony