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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Brian McNeil
<brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:
>  I strongly suspect this aspect of that
>  particular "pact with the devil" is what many, many Wikipedians would
>  strongly object to.

I would tend to agree that many wikimedians would disagree with this.
However, in the absence of real poll data, we will never know for
certain. There certainly are several people who are very vocally
opposed to it, but we don't have any data when it comes to people who
aren't subscribed to this mailing list, or people who don't care about
the issue enough to post a support or a criticism.

I suspect, and I certainly can't prove this, that the number of people
who "don't care" about this issue either way is very large. It might
be worth our time and energy to find a way to measure this.

I think that the most direct way to measure the communities feelings
on this issue would be to include referenda about it in the next board
election. Whoever handles the elections could easily add a handful of
optional questions to the end of the ballot, about this issue and many
others on which community opinion data would be valuable. All the
people who vote for the board (which is certainly a larger number then
those who are subscribed to this list) would have the option of saying
"yes" or "no" to the issue without having to join into a flamewar, and
they could post their opinions anonymously.

It's just a thought, but measurement always beats speculation, in my book.

--Andrew Whitworth