[Wikipedia-l] Shirt / Wikipedia-Logo

[Daniel Mayer]

Jimbo wrote:
>My own view is that it is unlikely that the 
>Amazon link would bring in very much money anyway.  
>It's incidental revenue at best.  If I'm right, 
>then there's no reason to have a big discussion 
>and fight over something that wouldn't matter much 
>anyway.

It would not only be Amazon but /every/ similar
service we could enter agreements with. I'm pretty
sure that that would generate an not-insignificant
amount of money (maybe enough to pay your cost for
Wikimedia bandwidth). 

>I estimate, by the way, that if we accepted 
>google adwords ads, we could bring in $20,000-
>$40,000 per month right now.  So if we want to
>have a big fight, we should fight about that.  :-)

Wow! Google ad-words are those little text ads on the
right hand side of Google searches, right? Those seem
to be very well-suited to whatever I am searching for
and I in fact find them useful. However, we already
have had one fork over just the rumor of advertising
and some people have stated that they would leave the
project if we started to have ads. I'm far more
pragmatic and think that having something unobtrusive
(and in fact useful to readers!) like Google adwords
would be a great thing to have. But IMO, this should
only be shown to non-logged-in users. Why? Well those
people who are logged-in are much more likely
contribute to Wikimedia by adding content, while those
who don't log-in are most likely just to be readers.
They should contribute as well by being exposed to
unobtrusive (and in fact useful) adwords. 

A mock-up of a Wikipedia article with adwords will be
needed. Then we should have a wide-ranging discussion
on the pros and cons of having them. When that is done
we should have a two-level vote: A Wikimedia-wide vote
on Meta about whether to allow /any/ Wikimedia wiki to
have adwords. If say 75% of Wikimedians vote to allow
adwords at all then there would be a per wiki vote on
the respective wikis on whether or not to have adwords
on their wiki (75% margin needed there as well). 

Some problems; What are we going to do with all that
money? If we can't spend it, would that jeopardize our
nonprofit status? I think it would be a step backwards
for Wikimedia to become a for-profit organization. 

Some possible ways to solve above problems; Hire
mostly part-time executives (with maybe a full-time
President) and programming staff and use the leftover
money to fund paper/CD publication and distribution
(heck maybe even buy ultra-cheap GNU/Linux boxes with
all Wikimedia content preloaded on them). 

Just some thoughts. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree