[Foundation-l] Benefits of advertising (was Our exponentiallyincreasing costs)

[Delirium]

Poe, Marshall wrote:

>Could someone, just for the benefit of this (relative) outsider and
>journalist, explain what the basic objections are to AdSense type ads on
>Wikipedia? I know you'll be speaking for yourself and not the community,
>and will read the explanations accordingly.
>  
>
 From my point of view:

1) I think ads on the internet typically look gaudy and unprofessional.  
Reliable, authoritative pages from non-profit organizations rarely have 
ads---take a look at, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 
which is also in financial straits but ad-free 
(http://plato.stanford.edu).  Or http://www.gnu.org.  Take a look at 
http://www.dailykos.com for an extreme example of the opposite.

2) By their keyword placement, they allow people with money and a bit of 
trial and error to purchase prominently-displayed links to rebuttals on 
specific Wikipedia article pages.

-Mark