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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
It is not exactly a non-zero sum game. When a projects decides to have
adverts, does this mean that projects without adverts will benefit from this
as well? Will the benefits be allocated to things that benefit a project
that accepts ads? So far our budget was based on what needed to be paid and
it was paid from the money we received from donations. With adverts, it will
be painfully obvious when a project benefits from the revenues generated by
other projects while refusing to be part of the solution.

The biggest problem that I have with the people who are so vocal in their
condemnation of the merest consideration of advertisements is that they
expect that their sense of priorities is to determine the priorities of the
Wikimedia Foundation. The good news is that with the professionalisation of
our Foundation the potential for more successful fund raising is increasing.
We just have to wait and see to what extend this will suffice to prevent the
need for advertising.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:08 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
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