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

[Anthony]

On 10/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Nothing is solely up to the foundation. Plenty of people have made it
> > > clear they would leave/fork if adverts were added to Wikipedia. If the
> > > foundation wants to continue to have projects to host, they need to
> > > listen to what their users want. They understand this, I think it very
> > > odd that so many users seem not to.
> > >
> >
> > By users you mean more than just the handful of active users? If the
> > active users who are freedom fanatics forked, their place would be
> > filled by the many contributors who don't contribute now due to the
> > amount of bureaucracy and philosophy that gets thrown around. Users
> > won't abandon Wikipedia because of ads, they never abandoned anyone
> > else because of it, why start with the single most handy resource on
> > the web.
>
> If there were two Wikipedias, one with ads, one without, which do you
> think readers would go to?

Depends on a lot of factors, like how annoying or useful are the ads,
how up-to-date are the varying sites, which one shows up higher in the
search results, what features do the different sites offer, etc.

Google has ads, and Scroogle Scraper doesn't, but most people still go
to Google to search.  Actually I consider Google ads to be a benefit
more than a detriment.  They'd be even better if they'd screen their
advertisers more, though.

> The only thing the original Wikipedia would
> have going for it is brand recognition.

Brand recognition is everything, though.  Brand recognition is the
reason Wikipedia gets all the traffic it gets.  Everything else can be
easily and legally copied, and there are plenty of people who would
like to take over all that traffic, even if they wouldn't make any
money doing so.

This doesn't mean Wikipedia is untouchable.  A fork could come along
and take it down, and I think eventually it's bound to happen.  But
it's going to take a really big reason to compete with the synergies
of being *the place* to go to collaborate on writing a free
encyclopedia.  I seriously doubt ads alone would be a big enough
reason to defeat that.  Especially if all the money coming in from ad
revenue was used in a remotely useful way.  An ad-supported site would
presumably be much faster, much better looking, and have many more
features.  It'd be like the difference between http://www.google.com/
and https://ssl.scroogle.org/