[Foundation-l] Optional advertisement on wikipedia
Michael R. Irwin
michael_irwin at verizon.net
Sun Apr 23 13:37:55 UTC 2006
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>I'd guess the open questions would be:
>
>1) How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF?
>
>
Zero impact. Nonprofit means that surplus revenue is not handed to
private individuals as a return on investment. The Wikimedia Foundation
can funnel as much money as they and their contributors feel they are
willing invest in the public good/purpose as per the
charter/organization plan/etc. approved by the State of Florida. I
have been told that arrangements are in progress to select a CPA and get
the first required audit completed.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of approximately 25
billion dollars so given billy boy's and pals past performance in
extracting revenue from captive or coerced markets it probably has an
annual income from stock dividends or splits anywhere between 2.5 and 5
billion dollars.
That revenue is government regulated and must be spent in accordance
with the laws of the state, country or tax haven the foundation is setup
within. If you are interested you might be able to find an audit
report for past years online somewhere.
>2) Will the advertising programs be okay with only showing the ads to
>some small fraction of our users?
>
Several potential problems occur to me:
1. Back in the good ol days whenever the issue of revenue came up Jimmy
always came forward as a generous sugar daddy with deep pockets. The
issue always went away. I believe he made some committments regarding
ads and ad revenue. He also made some good points about the benefits
of no distraction from the authentic information on an encyclopedia page.
He will probably take a bit of a credibility hit with the forkers he was
discouraging if he now decides that advertising is necessary and ok.
Certainly I will waste no opportunity to shout it from the housetops.
2. Advertising revenue implies counting who and how may have seen the
ads. I am already rationing my use of google and other search engines
which spy on me and which are required by law to secretly share the
results of this spying with regulatory authorities and secret police.
Further, most of the privacy statements are long winded and weasally
but eventually get around to some kind of sharing with affiliates,
partners, consortium, multinational conglomerate pieces, etc. etc.
Probably the easiest way to implement this user choice is a fork.
Answers.com currently supports itself by reporting Wikipedia data
packaged with advertising. There are others around the net. Most of
them do not provide identification information regarding who owns the
revenue stream generated. I sincerely hope they are not affiliated with
any of our volunteers, employees or stacked Board members or affiliated
assets.
An easy way to experiment would be for Wikia to turn on a fork using
user choice as you suggest and find out what happens.
If this would be too potentially detrimental to our all powerful
figurehead and beloved God King or the community ..... then some other
volunteer, developer, profiteer, or entrepreneur could emulate
answers.com using the methods you suggest and possibly get rich.
3. Revenue sources are always applicable to discussion regarding fat
cat biases built into information products. The guys with the gold
always want to make the rules ... and then change the rules when
somebody starts to kick the shit out of them on their own playing field
or even demand the dignity due a beast of burden diligently pursuing
masters' programs given priority over personal responsibilities or
inclinations.
This is somewhat similar to the debates we used to have over whether
P'hds simply must have courtesies and preference due their long years of
servitude in academia rather than justify their opinions with citations
and actual data or arguments if Wikipedia were to attract any adequate
expertise to prosper. I wonder how he is doing with his for profit
cable venture presenting P'hd'ed expertise freed from academia to the
masses?
Who makes the rules around here? The guy that controls the stacked
Board controlling the nonprofit foundation paying for the centralized
editing bandwidth, the advertisers with the gold, the P'hds with
unsubstantiated opionions and no time to make their case piece meal with
drooling slackjawed trolls or script kiddies experimenting with Turing
Tests, the measily masses of volunteers who show up occasionally, or the
enlightened readers/writers of the TINC list?
Regards,
lazyquasar
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