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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
>  To state the obvious.... what community ? There are over 250 Wikipedias,
>  there are Wiktionaries, Wikiversities, Wikibooks etc. all of them build
>  their own communities, their own policies. So I am not sure at all what
>  community you are talking about. What is absolutely clear to me is that
>  there is no consensus among all these communities and even within a single
>  community it is hard to find agreement on any single issue.

Gerard does raise a good point here, It's likely going to be a lot
better if we target things on a per-project basis. Some projects might
be very amenable to advertisements, and some (like the oft-cited
spanish wikipedia) likely would not be. If we started with
controversial things like ads on some projects, maybe the larger and
more-disagreeable projects would learn from the example.

If we said "targeted advertisements are an available option", and
allowed individual projects to opt in and out of it, that might
produce a very gradual migration effect.

--Andrew Whitworth