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

[Oldak Quill]

On 10/03/2008, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree entirely with Gregory that as long as donations cover the cost
of running the sites, donations will be sufficient. I don't see how to
justify advertising on Wikimedia projects if that advertising were
being used to raise funds over those needed to run the site. In this
case, advertising would only support more extraneous things
(Wikimania, e.g.), and this isn't worth risking our actual and
perceived independence for.

Hopefully, new innovations will reduce the cost of running the site so
that this will never be a worry. Possible avenues are distributed
hosting, encouraging Chapters to set up servers in their respective
countries to spread costs...

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)