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

[David Goodman]

We are not promoting such engines as part of any quid pro quo. We are
doing what we always do, presenting what in our judgement is the best
available resources available.

If there were equivalently reliable and comprehensive widely used
open source non-profit search engines, that worked with the sytems our
users and editors have available to them, we would I hope mention them
primarily, and we would primarily use them. Using Google and Yahoo the
way we do is like any other external reference: we link to whatever
site best serves the needs of the users and editors.  There are cases
where w do not have to do this, as for books, where we have the isbn
referral system; for maps, there is an active discussion on how to do
similarly. We give directions for how to use the system with Windows
and  OSX, as well as with open source operating systems, because that
is what is in the opinion of the people writing the help pages as
appropriate for the users and editors.



On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/12/08, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 12/03/2008, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  >  As a community member, I *want* to be asked about content-related
>  >  >  matters (like licenses are; for which I am *not* asked);
>  >
>  > Really? Commons community worries about the CC 3.0 licenses actually
>  >  got CC to issue a clarified version in specific response to those
>  >  concerns; and the Foundation certainly wasn't going to try to force
>  >  Commons to accept or not accept a given license version.
>
>  I said that nobody asked me about intention for switching from GFDL to
>  CC-BY-SA, which means not only changing the legal code, but changing a
>  license provider, too. I just saw in my mail Board's resolution. (And
>  I don't care what CC is doing, I care what WMF Board is doing.)
>
>  But, my intention was not to raise this question again, but to compare
>  for what community has to be asked and for what community's position
>  should be considered, but shouldn't be mandatory.
>
>
>  > I wouldn't mind ads either, personally, and we could certainly do with
>  >  the money. But I fear a lot of the community just getting up and
>  >  *leaving* if we did put ads on.
>  >
>  >  I think (I have no data) that the general public would still love us,
>  >  but they'd sigh in disappointment. (So they should give us more money
>  >  then ;-p )
>
>  We are promoting search engines on our search page for free. So,
>  firstly, we should start to take money from them like Mozilla.
>
>  After that we may think about other possibilities. And I am sure that
>  if WMF has ads, it will have enough money to give it to important
>  contributors. So, everybody would be happy ;)
>
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG