[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

[Brion Vibber]

On Nov 21, 2003, at 00:25, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable 
> future. I
> think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone 
> may not
> be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having
> something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that 
> scenario an
> added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no more 
> ads!

The last time this was suggested we lost most of the Spanish-language 
contributors to an acrimonious fork.

If you want to set up your own Wikipedia mirror with ad banners and 
send the money to the foundation, go for it; but the day there are 
advertisements on the main Wikipedia site we'll lose a lot of people, 
including me.

Our primary resource is people, not money; we'd be better off with not 
enough cash donations from people who care (plus offers of technical 
help and free hosting) than rolling in dough without people. One of the 
benefits of the license model after all is that it explicitly allows 
the content, and thus the project, to live on if the current host 
folds.

To bring a little extra cash into the foundation without pissing a lot 
of people off, we might look into merchandizing. An actual usable 
CD-ROM version could sell at least some token copies (think in 
particular of those folks in countries where internet access is largely 
limited to pay-per-minute dial-up), and hey, who doesn't want a 
Wikipedia T-shirt? :)

(Which reminds me -- Jimbo, do you still have a hojillion Nupedia 
coffee mugs lying around as was once rumored?)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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