[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia struggles, Mozilla set for life?

[William Pietri]

GDonato wrote:
> Personally, I really dislike the idea of any advertising on Wikimedia. 
> This makes a fool of [[WP:NPOV]], [[WP:COI]] and related policies and 
> guidelines. It should only be considered if things get extremely 
> desperate. The advert-free site is refreshing and welcoming and that is 
> something we should strive to keep, pretty much at all costs.
>   

I'm not advocating here; I'd just like to probe this view a little. It's 
one I mainly agree with, but I'm wondering if there's some way we could 
increase revenue without risking NPOV or COI.

Two ideas:

1: On our search results page, we put a little sidebar. It says, "Didn't 
find what you're looking for? Try your search on Google, MSN, Yahoo, 
AOL, Ask,  or PowerSet." Each one of those is a link, and we work out a 
revenue share deal with each search engine for the traffic we send them.

2: On the first page that a user visits from a search engine result, we 
run that search engine's text-only ads on the side of that one page. If 
they continue on with Wikipedia, they see no more ads. This is only for 
traffic arriving from commercial search engines.


The reason these might be different is that a) we don't interrupt the 
normal flow of use, and b) the user is in complete control of what 
vendor is serving them the ads.


Would approaches like this be safer in your view?

William


-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri