[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

[Imran Ghory]

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> >No way!! Many people, me included, contribute to wikipedia 
> >because of a spirit of freedom/communist zeal/whatever that 
> >would largely evaporate if wikipedia started serving ads. Even 
> >a symbolic thing like the change from wikipedia.com to 
> >wikipedia.org was a big motivation for me. Anyway didn't Jimbo 
> >promise us long back that there would *never* be ads on 
> >wikipedia? :) 
> 
> 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! 

Why don't we do the opposite: Have opt-in ads for logged in users. So that
way we'd only be showing ads to the people who specifically requested
them without alienating anyone else. Hopefully enough people will be happy
to have ads on to make it worthwhile (and profitable) for wikipedia.

Imran
-- 
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran