-- Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
With respect, this is a fairly strange line of
argument. Objectively,
there is nothing particularly bizarre or strange
about Wikipedia as an online community. There are other wikis, there are >other collaborative projects, there are >other online forums etc etc. So all of that
is not in itself a reason to say "Wikipedia >is so
different that it makes sense
for it to continue being different by having no
ads".
I generally tend to agree with you, but 1) the issue isnt really as fancy as that, and 2) <sarcasm>Wikipedia is not a community/democracy/etc./etc./<sarcasm>
Im guessing that growth projections would show that if Wikipedia didnt have any server problems whatsoever, it would now rank about 10 (instead of 30). So once the server situation gets up to its optimal capacity (theres a market cap for everything: maybe at 2x current capacity) there will be other costs. Legal fees, paid server techs, backpay for work (to keep people happy), limousines, etc. With success comes its costs. Does WP's continued success depend more on those princples or on its financial and commercial competitiveness with commercialist or academic/elitist upstarts/restarts. Arent there degrees in-between?
WP's huge demand makes it not just needing to keep up, but it puts it in a position to make egalitarian demands and not merely bend to commercialist ones. Open model success might have limits, but a high enough degree of success makes the very notion of ads at least [[edit]]able, and therefore feasibly compatible with the open culture. Fastfission did a good job of breaking down the basic 'compromise' about how ads could work.
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