[Foundation-l] Optional advertisement on wikipedia

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 4/22/06, Tony Bruguier <tony.bruguier at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm new to this list, so please forgive me if I mess up. There's been
> some talk about advertisement on wikipedia or not. Why not make it
> optional, so that each user decides if he/she wants to see the
> advertisement? That way, users can "support" wikipedia or not. I don't
> think that'd be a sell out.

I think this is a fantastic idea, (although I'm sure it's been heard
before), especially if we defaulted it to off and made it a user
preference.

But there are a lot of other issues with advertising beyond the
community issues, such as the impact on the foundations charitable
non-profit status.

In any case, such a move might be a way to start further exploring
advertising without upsetting the community or bringing in enough
money to cause huge tax complications. It would also give editors who
don't donate money because they feel they already donate time a way of
helping out with the server bottom line. I suspect would avoid much of
the risk of donations going down because people believe we are ad
supported, although I don't have enough data to determine how many of
our donors are editors/have accounts. It would be nice to collect that
data in the future.

I'd guess the open questions would be:

1) How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF?
2) Will the advertising programs be okay with only showing the ads to
some small fraction of our users?

Software wise this would be fairly straightforward to implement, and
could even be done to a limited extent by the users without developer
involvement (by inserting the advertising code in the users
monobook.js).