Neil Harris wrote:
What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say)
$ 2 x 10^-4 per
hit for an official real-time mirror service?
We already have something very similar, in the form of a paid OAI-PMH subscription.
It's kept very
quiet, maybe for PR reasons, so there aren't many subscribers.
As a result:
* Wikipedia remains ad-free
That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the
Internet, and only one
of them is ad-free, that is the one at
wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via
the search
engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards
spamming those
search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia
pages.
* the WF gets revenue
* the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
without leeching unauthorized resources.
The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null
skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly
reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater
possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content
easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from
around the page contents.
The best cache hit rate is for ordinary anonymous page views. Unless hits from mirrors
were
responsible for a significant proportion of our traffic, the reduced cache hit ratio would
outweigh
any benefit from lightweight skins.
-- Tim Starling