[WikiEN-l] Regarding Advertising on Wikipedia

[Tony Wilson]

 LittleDan wrote:
>Why does everyone oppose advertizing? I it's descrete enough, it's not intrusive and doesn't lower our credibility.

I'll give you 10 reasons.

1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link
between advertising and influence/control over content establishing
itself. 

2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line
advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads
consume.

3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of
the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of
advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing
obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash

4: Because users have to pay per MB bandwidth charges to look at ads
they don't want to see.

5: Because many of our best contributors will walk out in disgust

6: Because a lot of contrbutors are doing a lot of hard work to create
a non-commercial resource of real value. If someone comes along and
says, "oh no, all those countless hours you donated to a free comunity
project, well, one day I'm going to turn around and use your sweat to
make a dollar" then my contribution stops right here and right now.
Ditto for a lot of other people. And if Jimbo pulls the pin one day and
we need money to keep going, then I'll put my hand in my pocket and
help out. Better yet, I'll just provide the hardware, and let some
other people pitch in to provide the bandwidth. (I own a computer shop:
I have any amount of hardware.) 

7: Because a site that carries advertising, even if i is still run on a
non-profit basis, would find it much more difficult to persuade people
to release material to it, in particular images. 

8: Because the relentless urge some people have to commercialise every
last damn thing on the planet is personally offensive: to me, and to a
great many other people - especially the sort of people who love
Wikipedia

9: Because this is an encyclopedia, not a second-rate imitation of
Encarta

10: Just because

Tannin