[WikiEN-l] Re: Ads on Wikipedia

[Lisa Thurston]

I'm absolutely opposed to ads appearing anywhere on Wikipedia or any
commercially-influenced content for that matter. Jimbo says that people will
question "why miss out on all that revenue?" To me this is a backwards way
of looking at the question of ads. I say "why risk introducing ads if they
are not really needed?" Some argue they are "needed" because the foundation
needs more money. If this is the case, then the question should be "how can
Wikimedia generate revenue?"

Given the large number of reasons why there should not be ads (I won't
repeat all of them), Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation should be funded
by donations or other sources which can have no special influence over the
content. The donors ought to including big corporations, again with no
special privileges to commercially influence Wikipedia. These corporations
would be ones which derive value from Wikipedia by the mere fact that it
exists and has thousands of editors worldwide; whose business model depends
on the existence of Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia community which encourages
many individual contributions. [Recently, Lisa Lynch blogged about why
Google and Yahoo commercially benefit from Wikipedia and this is a very
important perspective. Wikipedia is very useful for microscale data
mining/analysis (regardless of what value it might have for the individual
readership)<http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2005/12/why_google_and.html>].
Why shouldn't the companies making money from the Wikipedia data at the
microscale should be the primary funders of Wikipedia?

Lisa