[WikiEN-l] Re: Ads on Wikipedia?

[Peter Mackay]

> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org 
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
 
> Peter Mackay wrote:
> 
> >>From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> >>[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs

> >>Since there are already mirrors with ads, yes, there are people 
> >>chasing that money now. A high-quality clone that could 
> compete with 
> >>WP's name recognition would require significant investment 
> up front, 
> >>and take several years to establish itself in the public's mind;
> >
> >Your idealism and loyalty is laudable, but remember that in terms of 
> >quality, a teenager with a bit of Linux knowledge can download the 
> >whole lot for free and get it operational in an afternoon.*
> >
> That would be the "low-quality" clone. One Linux box is 
> easily slashdotted; the current WP installation laughs at 
> Slashdot, or so I'm told. Our teenager would have to buy 100+ 
> machines and get them all working in concert before going live.

Although they are similar words, "quality" and "quantity" have different
meanings. MediaWiki is robust high quality software and that's not going to
change whether it's running on a laptop or a server farm. As I noted for
this not so hypothetical teenager "*dealing with success and bandwidth might
be a problem, however".

Getting back to the original point, charging Google enough to keep WP
running isn't going to do much beyond providing an incentive for Google to
put up their own online encyclopaedia. I would imagine that if they were
pressed, Google could get the MediaWiki software and Wikipedia content
loaded and tested in a matter of days, if not hours, and alter their search
results to give their "Googlopedia" a higher precedence than Wikipedia. We
don't have any sort of "big stick" to threaten Google with.

Peter (Skyring)