[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Delirium]

Mike Godwin wrote:
> Geoffrey Plourde writes:
>
>   
>>  How many times does this have to be pounded home? If you put ads in  
>> WP or any other project, there would be a fork. Look at the Spanish  
>> WP if you don't believe me.
>>     
>
> I think it probably can't be pounded home anymore, because the  
> difficulties of forking a large project these days are understated  
> these days.  (You can fork content, but forking decently performing  
> infrastructure is much harder, given the growth in our audience.)   
> There are reasonable arguments to be made against advertising, but I  
> don't think the "fork" argument holds any water. (I guess if it did  
> that would make it a "spoon" argument.)
>   
I'm not sure that's really true. A fork would mainly take editors with 
it at first, not casual readers, so the initial infrastructure 
requirements aren't all that large--- It's not as if a fork would 
instantly inherit Wikipedia's Google rank, name recognition, search 
bars, etc. Of course if it were a successful fork it would eventually 
attract a bigger share of the readers too, but it'd have time to grow to 
meet that demand if so. And there are lots of people who can provide 
significant infrastructure anyway--- the Spanish Wikipedia fork was 
initiated at a university, and many universities have pretty good 
computing infrastructure already in place, especially when it comes to 
nearly free, nearly unlimited bandwidth. I think a more likely way a 
fork would fail is that it wouldn't attract *enough* people to become a 
viable alternative, not that it wouldn't have the technical 
infrastructure to support what people it did attract.

-Mark