[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The question of why ads is in my opinion already a secondary one. The
primary one is do we have what it takes financially to do what we aim to do.
More specifically does our finances cover our budget.

In principle I am against advertisements because they occupy valuable on
screen space. It is however exactly because of screen space being valuable
that advertisements are able to bring in money.  The problem in the
discussion that the primary question is not addressed and as I value the
aims of the Wikimedia Foundation over my personal preferences against
advertisements I find this troubling.

There are many things that cost money that have a huge impact on our ability
to bring information to the people that we do it all for. And I would like
to quote the bible when I argue for the support of the people who read and
write less and least resourced languages; "what you do for the least among
us, you do for me". (sorry if my English knowledge of scripture is not that
good.. you may recognise what I aim to quote anyway).

The "stichting" I represent has invested in MediaWiki localisation. It makes
some difference. I want to invest more in localisation and in terminology. I
want to invest in the availability of great open source fonts that cover at
least all the languages we support and all the languages that are in the
Incubator (and are recognised in the ISO-15924 standard). In many ways in
this way I am doing things that I feel strongly about, several of these
things can be done more effectively within the WMF. The WMF is not in a
position to do this. The lack of funding does in my opinion seriously affect
what it can do. It is also too much occupied in the things that make sense
from a first world perspective. The WMF is in many ways an organisation that
allows people to do their own thing.

Again, the main problem with our discussion about advertisement is first
that people do not consider why it would be needed and second because people
understand the aims of the WMF differently to the extend that some consider
the WMF as nothing but a hosting organisation and not as the movement it
also is.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 1:15 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

>
> White Cat wrote:
>
> > >  I whole heartedly hate the idea of advertisements on
> > >  wikipedia but if we are going to have ads they should not be
> > >  inline ones.
>
> Andrew Whitworth wrote:
>
> > I dont think i necessarily agree with this. Some inline ads
> > would not be entirely unacceptable. All ads should be text-based
> > (not blinking animated gifs, not flash, nothing with audio,
> > etc). Ads should be relegated to a very specific section of the
> > page where there will not
>
>
> Some community members who oppose ads might be tempted to say
> "yeah, whatever, let's accept ads so we can finally get rid of
> this discussion topic".  The two pieces above, however, indicate
> that the discussion of *whether* to have ads is the shorter one.
>
> A much longer discussion about *how* the advertizing should be
> done would ensue, should a decision be taken to have ads.
> Avoiding that discussion is already a strong argument against ads.
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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