[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Involving
>  contributors by asking for donations is great - relying on the continued
>  generosity of these contributors to put the foundation on a sound footing
>  for the long term is irresponsible.

While I agree with you that many of the arguments against advertising
are bogus, I can't at all agree with the above.

Wikimedia is a charity and I don't just mean that it has a particular
tax status under US law, but rather that its fundamental mission is
one of public service.

Through innovative operation the WMF sites are able to comfortably
operate, meeting the essential needs to keep the site up and serving
users, with a fairly small amount of money which well within the
average level of donations.

Certainly there are additional endeavors which are helpful to the
mission, like paying for Wikimedians to travel to Wikimanias in exotic
locations... and these efforts do put a larger burden on fundraising,
but they are non-essential and could be put on hold if it ever came to
that.

When it comes down to it... as a charity, a public service, people
*ought* to want to give Wikimedia money to operate Wikipedia. This
should be especially viable since most of the operational cost are
roughly proportional to popularity (and hopefully sub-linearly
proportional...).

If some day so few people want to give money to keep Wikipedia running
that it couldn't stay running without ads then truly something wrong
has been done, and if it really came to that I think we might conclude
that the world may be better off without it Wikimedia if it couldn't
even bring donations in to the tune of a fraction of a cent per user
per month.

This doesn't mean that I don't think that additional modes of funding
aren't good and worth exploring... and that advertising might be a
reasonable one... they well may be,  but the notion that failing to
run ads is irresponsible is just too far.

We need to keep a careful eye on the difference between nice to haves
and need to haves, and consider how much of the current budget are for
nice to haves and their related overheads before we could say the lack
of ads is such a failure.   I don't think it is today... and unless
the office undertakes some incredible empire building, making it
difficult to scale back to the essential core mission, I don't see how
it could be at any point in the future.