[Foundation-l] A modest proposal: ads on wikipedia.com

[cohesion]

On 4/23/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23/04/07, cohesion <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
>
> > I'm not opposed to having opt-out advertising on wikipedia.org, but I
> > don't really understand why we would want to dilute our url structure
> > and pagerank on *every* term by creating a weird commercial non-fork.
>
>
> What use is pagerank to us?

Maybe I shouldn't have used the term pagerank, I don't mean it in a
google proprietary way, I mean it more as a general measure of URL
authoritativeness.

I like to think we are at least sort of concerned about the general
organization of knowledge on the whole internet. When our potential
users search google for, say, "Cholesterol", Wikipedia is in the top 5
results (#2 for me now). This is a good thing, because we offer a
neutral factual article. I personally think
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol is the *best* URL for that
term.

I'm not saying we should care about pagerank for all the normal
reasons most websites do (revenue), we should care because we are
doing a good job at making useful articles, and letting people read
and access them is good.

This is the case for thousands of terms, forking the URLs breaks this,
and I don't see why we need to break this fundamental feature of the
internet just to serve ads. I'm ambivalent on ads, I just don't like
the idea of 2 URLs for the same content.

> If they aren't, Overture will. Or MSN ads.
>

Right, whoever :)

> Stable versions would create much the same thing, though.

Except at the same URL, which is all I am concerned about.

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]