[Foundation-l] No, even a couple of Google ads on each page would be a fatally bad idea

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 11:22 PM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does Wikimedia currently have a financial problem? It does not appear too.
> So if the funding model is not broken what are we trying to fix / accomplish
> with advertising? Wikipedia currently gets hundreds of millions of dollars
> worth of content from its volunteer editors. Many of us would be a little
> turned off to say the least if ads starting appearing on the pages we were
> working on. It is not worth risking our contributors if at this point these
> finances are not needed. BTW it is enough work already keeping advertising
> off of Wikipedia pages the last thing we should do is legitimize it.
>
> I guess one trial would be to start a separate mirror that allows
> advertising on Wiki content. A few of these already exist. Moving to
> something more would require unanimous approval of our editing body IMO.
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
> _______________________________________________

An interesting idea would be a standalone static copy of
wikipedia that really tried their utmost to make the product
visually appealing, and used the generated money from the
advertisements purely to fund ever more timely database dumps

It would be interesting to see how frequent database dumping could be
financed by advertisement on such a
site; the synergy should be obvious -- the more money they generate
from adverts, the more resources they can devote to making ever more
frequent dumps, so the more timely is the content, which will again
make therir product more attractive, and so on


--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]