On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Hermione1980 wrote:
I'm not opposed to ads on Wikipedia per se. I am, however, vehemently opposed to those damn flashing red-and-white banners that scream at me from some websites. As long as any hypothetical ads to be put on Wikipedia are unobtrusive, I'm not going to scream too loudly.
This is one of the reasons I am opposed to advertising on Wikipedia: far too many web ads are designed with the intent of drawing attention to themselves, which distracts from the content of Wikipedia. I doubt many people would find it easy to work their way thru an article on mathematics or rewrite the tortured syntax of a syntax while from the corner of the browser an ad for a dating service flashes the cleavage of some attractive woman -- one of my recent annoyances with the Userfriendly website. (I also despise internet dating services for other reasons, which are not relevant here.)
Insuring that any Wikipedia ads adhere to some standard only increases the overhead that accompanies advertisements. As Eclectology noted in another post, if you have ads, then you need to pay someone to track (& collect) the revenues. Then there is the cost of marketing Wikipedia ads . . . which leads to a group of people with a vested interest in monitoring article content (for example, adding pressure to remove or rewrite articles about sexuality so that Wikipedia isn't blocked by potential eyeballs).
One important thing about not having ads is that it is a return to the older Internet, a place where explicit commercial use was forbidden. Maybe I've improved my memories of that environment, but I remember that there a certain sense of community there whee everyone was more willing to share -- even the porn, believe it or not, was free.
Ads on websites have helped to erode that sense of community. Whenever ads appear on a website, this cannot help but create a sense of us vs. them: the users who are subjected to ads, & the people behind the website who presumably are getting rich off of the ads. Thus this would send a message contrary to the official one that Wikipedia is as accessible as possible to all; & I suspect that advertising on Wikipedia would be soon followed by an increase in vandalism, & a decline in new members.
These are just a few immediate thoughts I have on the matter. It might be more informative to study just how the community around the Internet Movie Database changed when Amazon bought it.
Geoff